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As a fellow marketer, I fully understand what a lengthy effort content marketing can be.

It takes a healthy amount of research, brainstorming, and careful crafting to produce a single piece of content. Then there’s the SEO, social scheduling, influencer outreach…

When you’re finally done, you’re really ready to be done.

But checking your on-page SEO (even after the fact) is important to make sure you’re ranking highly and driving the most search traffic to your content possible.

Alexa’s new on-page SEO checker can help you analyze your content to make sure it’s optimized for search the best it can be.

Here’s how to check on-page SEO with Alexa.

Enter a landing page + target keyword pair

From your Alexa dashboard, navigate to Check On-Page SEO. Once in the tool, enter a published landing page URL and the keyword or phrase you’re targeting.

PRO TIP: It’s important to target a single keyword or phrase (supplementing with related terms) so you send a crystal clear signal to search engine crawlers what your content is about. Remember, a search in Google can be considered a question and your content the answer. The content that answers the question in the clearest, most focused way will rank highly.

If you don’t have a target keyword or phrase, you can use Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty tool to help you to choose the best fit for your content at the right competition level.

✪ Read how to find the best keywords for your website

Analyze your SEO content

Once you’ve added your landing page + target keyword, click Analyze. We’ll run an SEO check up to make sure you’re meeting important best practices.

You’ll get a full on-page SEO report with recommendations for specific ways to optimize your page even more.

The report is organized into 4 categories:

• Relevance – These optimizations help make sure search engines recognize your content is relevant to the target keyword you’ve chosen.

• SERP Appearance –How your landing page will appear in search results. The more descriptive the content is, and how much of it is visible, make a difference in how appealing your content is to click on.

• Visitor Experience (UX) – Search engines consistently report that good user experience (UX) is an important part of ranking well in SERPs. A page that puts a user’s experience first will rank higher. These optimizations look for things like accessibility, linking, and responsiveness to determine a page’s UX.

• Target Keyword – Targeting a single keyword is the best way to send a clear signal to search engine crawlers that your content is about a particular topic. And making sure the keyword or phrase you choose is within your site’s Competitive Power makes it more likely you will rank for that term.

Spend time reviewing your report. Expand sections where optimizations were found. You can even export your results to a CSV to work offline.

Each recommendation in your on-page SEO analysis gives detailed directions for how to improve. We even include snippets of HTML so you can see where each change is reflected in your code.

After we check on-page SEO for your landing page + keyword pair, your report will be added to the tool’s main page.

Make important updates to your page and then analyze it again. We’ll scan your page as many times as you would like. And each time we’ll give you an updated report that reflects your changes.

If everything looks good in a category – you’ll see a green checkmark!

As you create and publish more content, analyze each of your landing pages to be sure you’re doing everything you can to stay competitive in search.

On-page optimization is a must if you want to maximize your hard work and your site’s organic traffic performance. And Alexa’s on-page SEO checker makes it easy.

Give it a try today with a free 7-day trial of our Advanced plan.

Jennifer Johnson

Jennifer is Marketing Coordinator at Alexa. With a knack for syntax and passion for building connections, she drives daily content strategy to bring you the latest and greatest happenings within Alexa and the wide world of web analytics and marketing.

Latest posts by Jennifer Johnson (see all)

Keyword research for SEO is non-negotiable.

Your SEO performance and your website traffic depend on it.

And the growth of your business is increasingly tied to it.

But, choosing the right SEO keywords for your website content is exceedingly difficult. Particularly for small to mid-sized businesses whose domain authority is a far cry from the Inc.’s and CNN’s of the world.

So how should you approach keyword research for SEO, given your site’s unique ability to rank?

Know your Competitive Power

In combat sports like boxing, and wrestling, weight classes are used to fairly distribute and match competitors. The idea is, for example, that pitting an athlete against an opponent 75 pounds heavier would give the latter an unfair advantage.

Essentially, “punching your weight” is the fairest way to compete, as it ensures both athletes an equal chance at success.

One might apply this philosophy to the art of keyword research for SEO. Competing for broad keywords targeted by huge brands with strong domain authority is a lost battle for most from the start.

One way to confidently choose SEO keywords you have the best chance of ranking for is to focus on your Competitive Power.

Your Competitive Power is your benchmark for “punching your weight”. It’s the measurement of your site’s ability to rank for competitive keywords, based on your past performance driving organic traffic. The higher this number, the more easily your site can rank for more competitive keywords.

Your Competitive Power will help you confidently choose keywords that your site has a good chance of ranking for.

You can locate your Competitive Power in Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty tool. Keywords that are at or below your Competitive Power are in your weight class. You’ll find them flagged with a lightning bolt for quick identification.

Focus on Highly Relevant, Low Competition Keywords

Once you know your Competitive Power, your SEO keyword research will be much more focused.

Next, you should concentrate your search on highly relevant, low competition (or long-tail) keywords.

Besides being less competitive, there are other valuable reasons to find low competition keywords:

1. Low competition keywords are usually more specific in nature
2. More specific keyword searches make it easier to craft tailored content that is laser focused on search intent
3. A well-crafted, tailored piece of content that answers search intent is usually rewarded with more organic traffic and referrals

Using Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty tool, you can find low competition keywords that are highly relevant to the services, products, or values of your brand. Simply enter a seed word or phrase, and then filter your results to meet your specific criteria.

Along the way, you can also identify semantically similar or like-phrases that you can incorporate into your content. Doing so will help reinforce what your content is about, and send clear signals to search engine crawlers of your valuable message.

Low competition SEO keywords may be less popular, but they can be highly specific to your brand and a great starting point for small to mid-sized business focused on growth.

Utilize Keywords Already Driving Traffic to Your Site

In doing keyword research for SEO, don’t forget to take advantage of keywords already driving traffic to your site.

In the Keyword Difficulty tool, you can enter your own site in Step 2 and we’ll generate a list of untapped opportunities related to keywords that already send traffic to your site.

You can choose to filter out those keywords that already drive traffic to your site to get the clearest list of SEO keywords you have to work with.

Develop content around these keywords to maximize your SEO benefits and leverage your already proven search success.

Start Searching for Your Best SEO Keywords

Keyword research is a must for successful SEO. But it doesn’t have to be a guessing game.

Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty tool will help you find the best, most relevant keywords for your site based on your ability to rank – like your own personal SEO keyword generator!

Try it out today as part of our Advanced plan, and choose keywords with more confidence!

Jennifer Johnson

Jennifer is Marketing Coordinator at Alexa. With a knack for syntax and passion for building connections, she drives daily content strategy to bring you the latest and greatest happenings within Alexa and the wide world of web analytics and marketing.

Latest posts by Jennifer Johnson (see all)

Would you like to get started with SEO? But you aren’t sure if it’s worth all the effort?

Many start-ups neglect SEO in their early days. And it makes sense. They have limited time and resources. So it’s hard to commit to such a time-consuming pursuit.

But later, when they need to find scalable growth strategies, they shift their focus and find that getting SEO results is easier than they thought. And they regret not starting sooner. I’ve been there, done that, wasted a year and $60,000 cranking out content with no regard for SEO, and wished I had started SEO sooner.

So I want to help you discover that success before you make the same mistake.

Take the Groove blog as an example. They’ve had great success with their content marketing. Founder Alex Tubull says their blog is the biggest driver of revenue growth. Even with that success, they regret ignoring SEO for a long time. They dismissed it, thinking it was scammy. That is until they discovered that white hat SEO techniques make SEO simple, and easy to get results.

In this post, we’ll show you how to start SEO. The great news is–there are a few easy things you can do to get a couple of quick wins under your belt.

How to Start SEO Without Betting the Farm

No one wants to spin their wheels doing SEO only to find out it’s not working. The best way to start SEO is to run a few small tests, measure the outcome, and then increase your investment as your confidence improves.

Follow these three simple steps for a quick way to prove to yourself (and maybe your boss) that the results are worth the effort.

1. Pick a piece of content from your site that you’d like to drive more traffic to (30 minutes)
2. Choose the best keyword to target (30 minutes)
3. Tweak the content to optimize for that keyword (30 minutes)

With just a 1-1/2 hour investment, you’ll get some answer as to whether SEO can work for you.

STEP 1 — Pick a piece of content to optimize

This should be quick.

Think about these things. What posts on your site:

• are already popular
• have proven to be valuable to your readers or customers
• drive the most conversions

Those questions can be answered by looking at Google Analytics and any direct feedback you’ve gotten from readers, including Idea, social shares, and emails.

The key is to pick a page that does these things:

• Solves a problem of your target customer with educational content
• Subtly ties the education it provides to the solution your company offers

If you didn’t think about optimizing for SEO when you created that content, it’s a prime opportunity to make a few tweaks that’ll win some organic traffic.

STEP 2 — Choose a target keyword

This will take a little bit of keyword research, using the keyword difficulty tool. Long story, short–you’ll look for a keyword that is:

1. Highly relevant to the content and topic of the post you picked
2. Has a competition score that is within your site’s Competitive Power
3. Has a decent popularity among the shortlist of options that meet the requirements of 1 and 2

Think about what question your content answers. What might someone who needs to read your post enter into the search box when researching the topic? Start with your best guess as the seed phrase to kick off your keyword research.

Use Alexa’s keyword difficulty tool to find low competition keywords so you can uncover the most optimal option. Often, the seed keyword you think of is too highly competitive for your site. And sometimes it’s just too broad. Taking this step to do keyword research will help you find long tail keyword ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.

Look for relevance

As you sift through the ideas, think about how accurately the keyword ideas describe the content you plan to optimize. You want to avoid broad topics because those don’t drive the type of relevant traffic that has a very specific pain point they are trying to solve.

As you find highly relevant keyword ideas, add them to a shortlist so you can weigh them against each other to make a final selection.

Pro tip: Even if you find keywords that are relevant to your business but aren’t right for this piece of content, save them for later. This will speed up your future content creation process because you’ll have a list of ideas that are ripe for the taking.

Focus on low competition

Next, concentrate on the competition score of the keywords in your shortlist. The most important thing to consider is whether your site has a chance to rank for that keyword. Use your site’s Competitive Power score as a benchmark for knowing what level of competition you can take on. And use that to find keyword options that are at or below. The lower the score, the easier it will be to rank, and the more confidently you will be able to choose SEO keywords.

Read also: How to find the best keywords for your site

OK, now it’s time to focus on popularity

By now you should have a shortlist of probably around ten keyword ideas that are all fairly similar. So how do you choose which one to go with? Given the narrowed list of options that are both relevant and at a competition score your site can handle, look for the most popular option.

Keep requirements #1 and #2 as a top priority, and select the most suitable keyword that balances competition with popularity, so you have an easy time ranking for a keyword that has reasonable volume.

Pro tip: While you need to pick one primary target keyword, you can use the other keywords on your shortlist as related phrases to help you reinforce the topic without having to repeat the target phrase too often and risk keyword stuffing.

STEP 3 — Optimize the content for SEO

You have content — check

You have a target keyword — check

Now it’s time to include the keyword in the content–in all the right places.

You’ll do that by following on-page best practices (15 minutes) and by building inteal links (15 minutes)

Follow on-page SEO best practices

This is pretty straight-forward. You’ll want to include your target keyword in the following places:

• URL
• Page title
• Meta description
• H1 tag
• H2 tag
• Image alt tags
• Image file names
• Body content

Bonus: Also include keywords that are related and to your target phrase. This reinforces the topic of your post.

Build inteal links to the content

You need to do everything you can to tell Google what the page is about. You have a good start with the on-page SEO essentials above.

Now, you can reinforce the topic by linking to the page from other pages on your site.

Find pages that are somewhat related to the topic of your newly optimized post. Add links wherever it makes sense in the context of the page. Try to use the exact target keyword phrase in the anchor text of the link. You’ll often need to make a minor tweak to the wording to make this happen.

Here are some ways to find great places to add an inteal link:

• Search Google for “site:yoursite.com keyword phrase”

You’ll see a list of pages on your site that Google considers relevant to the search term. Choose pages you think will be suitable for incorporating a link to the page.

• Look in Google Search Console for pages receiving traffic for that keyword

Often, you’ll receive traffic from a keyword for which you didn’t intentionally optimize. Even if you only get a trickle of traffic to it, it tells you that Google sees it as somewhat relevant to the keyword. That’s a great page to add a link using the keyword as anchor text. It directs readers and Google to the page that was truly optimized for that term.

Here’s how to find inteal link opportunities in Google Search Console.

Go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics.

Enter your search term into the Queries filter.

Click on the Pages toggle.

In this example, I’ve filtered Queries that contain “keyword research.” And I’m looking at Pages that show up in SERPs.

The list of pages will be ones that receive impressions and perhaps even traffic for that keyword.

Since Google is displaying these pages for the keyword you are targeting, that means they see it as someone relevant–even if the position is really high or the clicks are low.

It’s a telling sign that Google sees these pages as related.

• Looking through a list of your blog posts

One way to jog your memory of related posts is to simply scroll through all your blog posts. As you see content that has some relationship to your newly optimized post, click through and scan for opportunities to squeeze in a link to the page.

Do it again

Chances are that you did that in less than 1-1/2 hours. And you probably found other great keyword ideas during step 2. Take those keywords, find content that you already have that is relevant to those other ideas and follow steps 3 and 4.

Repeat this for a handful of posts.

Did it work?

Come back in a couple of weeks. Take a peek at Google Search Console. Filter Queries by the target keyword.

Does the page you tweaked show up in the list of pages receiving traffic for that keyword?

If so, that’s your sign that a larger investment in SEO could work.

What should you expect from this SEO experiment?

Keep your expectations in line with the effort you invested. The goal of this experiment is to prove that SEO can work for you with a small win. It won’t be a runaway success that skyrockets your organic traffic. That’s unrealistic when you are just starting SEO. What you should see is a moderate increase in organic traffic to that one page of content you optimized. Now, imagine every piece of content on your site having that moderate increase. You’ll see how quickly those small wins can snowball into large increases in your site-wide organic traffic.

You might not be ranked in the top 10 positions. And you might not be getting a crazy amount of traffic. But the fact that Google is now seeing your content as being relevant to that search term is a big step in the right direction.

What to do next?

Now that you know how to start SEO with a small test, how do you scale up the results?

As you create new SEO content, start with keyword research. That is the foundation of a great SEO strategy. The more content you create that is optimized for search, the more Google will start seeing you as the authority on that subject.

It’ll create a snowball effect where each piece gets easier to rank. And the additional traffic you drive to each piece of content will add more and more to your overall volume of traffic.

Keep leaing about SEO with these great resources:

SEO Starter Guide by Google

QuickSprout’s Guide to Getting Found With SEO

Kissmetric’s Step-by-Step Guide to SEO

Ready to start SEO?

Alexa’s Marketing Stack makes it easy to:

• Discover easy-to-rank keyword ideas
• Improve your on-page SEO
• Follow technical SEO best practices

Sign up for a free trial of an Advanced plan, and take the first step toward starting SEO.

Kim Cooper

Kim has 12 years experience in demand generation, content marketing, and campaign management. Her expertise has helped grow user bases by as much as 7x year over year, and a startup from nothing to $1.2 million in revenue in just 3 years.

Latest posts by Kim Cooper (see all)

Let’s be honest. There’s no silver bullet with SEO. In fact, the complexity of SEO is in the overwhelming number of things you “must” do.

But who has time to check all the boxes on the SEO best practices checklist?

If there is one thing you cannot skip, it is keyword research.

The key to winning in the SERPs is to “punch your weight,” as Kristin, our Sr. Product Manager says.

In other words, find low competition keywords that your website has a chance of ranking for.

Finding the best keywords for your website is the foundation of a strong SEO strategy.

Without a solid keyword strategy as a strong base, everything you do to optimize for search is built on unstable ground.

What it means to find low competition keywords

Note the emphasis above on “for your website.”

Here’s the reality. Your website is not going to beat the big dogs in the SERPs if you are just getting started with SEO. By the way, SERPs is SEO lingo for Search Engine Results Pages.

You must start by finding keywords with low competition. Once you are winning in that arena, you can slowly move up to higher competition keywords. Often those are also high search volume keywords.

SEO experts often advise finding high volume low competition keywords. But…I’d recommend not focusing at all on high search volume keywords. At least not at first. The temptation can lead you to make bad decisions when choosing keywords.

Instead, focus on two things:

1. Finding keywords that are relevant to your subject matter and your business
2. Finding keywords with low competition

The first priority, finding relevant keywords, requires knowing your audience and your business. Usually a quick gut check works fine.

The second priority, finding low competition keywords, requires knowing your site’s Competitive Power. All websites do not have an equal chance of ranking on the first page of Google. After all, there are only 10(ish) spots.

So focusing on low competition keywords is the secret ingredient to SEO success. Aim too high and you will not stand a chance of ranking. Regardless of how great your content is the odds will not be in your favor for ranking and driving organic traffic.

So how low competition must you go?

It is different for each site. Your site’s Competitive Power is the benchmark for the amount of keyword competition that your site has the potential to rank for.

Finding low competition keywords means choosing keywords with a score at or below your Competitive Power.

In Kristen’s words, punch your weight.

How to find low competition keywords

This is the easy part. At least it is when using Alexa’s keyword difficulty tool.

Our keyword suggestion tool helps you find long tail keywords, based on:

• Relevance to the seed word or phrase you input
• Keyword competitiveness in relation to your site’s Competitive Power

As you browse the list of keyword ideas, you’ll find similar keywords that you would not have thought of, that are low competition and prime opportunities.

The emphasis on relevance means the signal to noise ratio is high. Other keyword research tools spit out results that aren’t that similar to your seed query–leaving you to sift out a bunch of irrelevant options. So you’ll save time by focusing only on keyword ideas that are truly in line with what you are looking for.

As you find the most suitable keyword opportunities, you can check keyword difficulty compared to your site’s ability to compete–it’s Competitive Power. Just look for the lightning bolt. That means the competition score is at or below your site’s Competitive Power. Add those to your Favorites as you pull together a shortlist of the best keyword opportunities.

Don’t you love when the most important thing is also the easy thing?

Get started! Find low competition keywords today

Alexa’s keyword difficulty tool makes it easy to discover keywords with low competition.

Sign up for a free trial of an Advanced plan, and take the first step toward SEO success.

Kim Cooper

Kim has 12 years experience in demand generation, content marketing, and campaign management. Her expertise has helped grow user bases by as much as 7x year over year, and a startup from nothing to $1.2 million in revenue in just 3 years.

Latest posts by Kim Cooper (see all)