After you’ve created a new website for your company, it only makes sense that you’re ready to hit the ground running. A winning website is one that ranks well on search engines. However, some of the most common industry keywords can almost seem impossible for a new website to rank for. Although the road will be difficult, ranking for common industry terms isn’t an insurmountable task. With the help of a qualified Dallas SEO team on your side, you can get the right practices in motion to rank for the right keywords that will get your website ranking at the top of popular search engines. Here’s an inside look at how you can approach difficult keywords you’d like it rank for as a new website.

What Makes Popular Keywords “Unattainable?”

If your website is brand new, it can seem like the most obvious keywords you need to rank for are always out of reach. A huge part of this obstacle is the age of your site and domain authority. For example, a new health insurance company trying to rank for the term “health insurance,” will always rank behind decades-old sites like Allstate, Fidelity and New York Life that have greater domain authority. As a new business and website, you must take the right approach and have patience⁠—and you have to be willing to rank behind huge brands. Among other things, big box stores and large corporations spend tons on advertising and have enormous link profiles, so they have a huge head start over new sites. So what can you do? Here are three approaches you can take to improve keyword rankings for some lucrative terms.

1. Start By Ranking for Long-Tail Terms

Long-tail keywords are the key to helping your new site rank for common terms in your industry. Aside from that overall boon, long-tail terms put your keywords in the mindset of your target audience and help get your site in front of more potential customers. This is the ultimate goal of a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, so, here is how to use long-tail keywords to your benefit. With your target keywords in mind, think about your audience’s intent when searching for the keyword. This is usually in the form of a long-tail search phrase. Let’s go back to our example of wanting to rank for “health insurance.” As an audience member looking for affordable health insurance, does typing in “health insurance” by itself really help you find what you need in a search engine? Sure, you’ll find the road to the answers you want but a great search is all about providing what an audience needs at that moment. So, if you run an insurance company and know what your audience wants, aim for localized and long-tail keywords that audiences are actually searching for.

This could include keyword phrases like:

• Affordable health insurance
• Cheap health insurance in Dallas
• Family health insurance plans in Texas

Long-tail phrases are easier to rank for and can help get your foot in the door when it comes to setting your site up as a source of authority for the more common keyword “health insurance.”

2. Create Content That Utilizes Your Target Keyword

Sit down with your SEO team and come up with a content strategy that helps you rank for long-tail keywords while squeezing in the generic keyword that you’re really trying to rank for. Content can range from the easily attainable blog post to more time-consuming and inventive content like an infographic or video. However you choose to approach your content, make sure that it meets these two key criteria:

The Content is Unique!

Although looking at the competition for content ideas isn’t an SEO crime, plagiarism will definitely raise Google’s red flags. So, make sure that your approach is one-of-a-kind and makes using essential keywords an exciting opportunity.

Your Content is Relevant

Any keyword that you want to rank for must be something that audiences actively search for. Relevant content that uses target terms is content that shows up in search results. It’s important to always perform keyword research before content creation to know the most searched terms at the time. Once you know what people are searching for, craft some content around these keywords while adding in other relevant keywords you’d like to rank for. Relevant content is useful content, and your audience isn’t the only party that notices your actions. If your relevant content begins to collect clicks and drives more traffic to your site, search engines will recognize your accomplishment and increase your site’s authority in your industry. When this happens, you’ll start to show up in a wider range of search results and potentially rank for more difficult and valuable keywords.

3. “Invisibly” Optimize for Your Keyword

No, we aren’t talking about cramming your content with invisible text that uses target keywords. That poor decision will get your site flagged and take up a lot of time that you could have used to create unique content and optimize it for target keywords behind the scenes. Even if you can’t find a natural way to work in your target keyword into your content there are always ways to ensure search engines pick up on your terms through general optimization.

Some creative ways to optimize for specific keywords include the following optimization opportunities on your website:

• Image alt tags
• Image file names
• Title tags
• Meta description tags
• Domain/Subdomain names

Your SEO team can help you use optimization to your advantage and work valuable keywords into your strategy without breaking any of Google’s guidelines. When you combine honest optimization with a consistent content output, your chances for ranking desired terms can substantially increase as your authority with Google and your target audience increases.

Play to Win the Long-Term Keyword Game with Dallas SEO Dogs

While we’ve given you some valuable advice for getting started with ranking for difficult keywords, this isn’t a success that happens overnight. Even the best SEO practices can take months to show a glimmer of the results that you may want out of certain keyword rankings. With that in mind, working on your business’s actual success while attempting to top rankings via DIY methods can quickly become stressful. Let the SEO experts at Dallas SEO Dogs help you along the journey to effective keyword optimization. We’re eager to meet you and learn more about your brand. Contact us today to schedule your free consultation with a member of our team.   About the author: Dallas SEO Dogs is one of the leading digital marketing agencies in the United States. We are a close group diverse in ethnicity, gender, age, personality, interest, and religious background. Team members have different experiences, perspectives, and insights into a wide array of business types and audience demographics.