In This Tourism Marketing Quick Tip:
A striking distance keyword is any search term in which you rank on page two of the search engine results. These are noteworthy keywords because you’re already so close to driving traffic but you need just a little extra boost to open the floodgates and drive more traffic and more revenue.
Follow along to learn how to:
- Identify your striking distance keywords
- Prioritize the right keywords
- Assess your competitors
- Make updates to your content
Steps to Finding and Utilizing Your Stiking Distance Keywords
1. Identify Your Striking Distance Keywords
The first thing you need to do is identify your striking distance keywords. To do this, you’ll need a tool like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console. If you use SEMrush, you can simply plug your domain name into the tool and then sort all the keywords by position. Remember, you are specifically looking for keywords that you rank on page two—that’s generally position 10-20.
2. Prioritize The Right Keywords
Once you’ve got your list, you’ll want to prioritize your keywords based on search volume and user intent. Start by picking a high-volume keyword with a high transactional intent.
3. Assess Your Competitors
Now that you have your query selected, Google that search term and start analyzing the competitor content that’s currently ranking on page one for your striking distance keyword.
The goal of this process is to learn and understand why your competitors are outranking you. Once you understand that, you can re-engineer what’s working for them and ultimately build a superior piece of content that does a better job of answering the user’s questions and meeting their need.
When you’re reviewing the competitor content, try to find patterns among the top performers. For example, which specific topics are the top competitors including? What kinds of content are they including? What forms of media are they using—video, imagery, gifs, etc? Do they commonly include specific keywords in the headings and throughout the content? Also, make sure to take note of word count, formatting, and the overall user experience.
4. Make Updates To Your Content
Once you have all of your research compiled, start making strategic updates to your piece of content.
Once you’ve accomplished that, hit publish, and monitor the performance.
