The #1 position on Google receives a Click Through Rate of 31.19 and 22.44 on desktop and mobile devices, respectively. And the CTR keeps on falling for every next search result down the SERPs. So, to drive more traction to your website, you should seek more ranking opportunities and aim for the #1 SERP position.

Here are some of the ways through which you can identify ranking opportunities for your website.

Note: For this post, I have used RankWatch (14-days free trial) – An SEO Tool.

Before we get started

Let’s begin by having an overview of your site’s current ranking in the SERPs.

Open RankWatch, log in with your account and add a new project.

You can add the project in 3 easy steps:

Step I:  Add the website you want to track

Step II: Select the countries and search engines for your site.

Step III: And finally, add keywords on which you want to track your website.

After adding the necessary information, RankWatch will kick start its algorithm and gather ranking data related to your site. You can find this information under Ranking Overview.

You can check the current rankings of your website on the added keywords along with each keyword’s search volume.

Various filters are provided for a more convenient rank tracking.

Once you know about your current SERP standings, it becomes easier for you to target new and better keywords to climb the rankings progressively.

Now, let’s get started with the ranking opportunities!

1. Find out the keywords for which you have top SERP rankings

Did you know there are keywords for which your site ranks higher other than your targeted keywords?

No need to panic if you don’t; most websites are unaware of those keywords. But it is necessary that you know about them because those keywords are a goldmine yet to be excavated.

To do this, you need to access RankWatch’s Low Hanging Fruits. This section includes all the keywords for which you already have excellent rankings but aren’t tracking them. You can optimize for them and improve your rankings easily by just clicking on “Start Tracking”

You need to analyse the complete LHF keyword list carefully and shortlist those which are relevant to your niche. Once you’ve done that, you need to formulate content around the chosen keywords organically. If the process is followed appropriately, you will experience progress in your rankings after a while.

2. Analyse how your competitors are performing

Your competitors can be an endless source of information that can help boost your SEO efforts and rankings.

By performing a competitor analysis, you can learn about what works and what doesn’t in your industry. Also, you can leverage your competitor’s weaknesses and utilize their strengths for yours.

But first, you need to identify your main competitors, RankWatch lists competitor in two categories: Organic and paid. You can access the list here:

RankWatch Dashboard → Competitors

RankWatch determines these competitors based on keywords, backlink profile, services they offer, etc.

If you scroll down, you will also find the search ad copies run by the paid competitors.

Now, after analysing the competitors, it’s time to dig deeper into the competition and mine out ranking opportunities. We will use RankWatch Link Center to do this.

Through link center, you can check backlink profile of your competitors and learn about their link building strategies.

You’ll get to know about the number of backlinks they have;

Their top landing pages, top linking domains, and top anchor texts.

To seek more ranking opportunities, you need to focus on building links from the top linking domains of your competitors.

Note: Top linking domains include sites from where your competitors are getting high-quality links.

You can reach out to those domains for adding your link to their site as well. But remember, you need a convincing reason to get inbound links from them.

For instance, if those domains allow guest posts, you can reach out to them accordingly by pitching an interesting guest post that will cater to their audience.

Apart from that, you can steal your competitor’s links by approaching their top linking domains with better content to link to and if the content is really valuable, they will replace it.

You need links from quality websites with high DA to climb up the SERPs faster than ever.

Note: If you don’t have a RankWatch account, you can use Link Explorer without signing up to gather backlink profile of your competitors for free.

3. Conduct a comprehensive audit of your site

Your site’s internal web pages can have plenty of ranking opportunities as well, you just need to dig them out. And RankWatch Site Auditor is the tool for the job.

RankWatch dashboard→ Site Auditor

Site Auditor has a designated crawler that identifies every on-site issue and categorizes them on the basis of priority level.

• High Priority Issues: Site issues that require immediate fixing.
• Medium Priority Issues: You can put off dealing with these issues for a while but not for long.
• Low Priority Issues: These issues can be stalled until high and medium priority issues are fixed.

Note: Don’t procrastinate fixing the issues as they are holding back your site from progressing your Google position..

Clicking on the number next to each issue leads you to the affected pages of your site.

For instance, we want to fix duplicate page sets issue as its criticality level is high. We can see that there is only one.

So, let’s see the page set.

The Site Auditor discovers that 2 pages are identical with one another.

And here is the URL of those pages.

You can access the URLs and add a canonical link sourcing to the page that performs well in Google SERPs. Or if you want to remove the page, you can do that as well. These are just some of the ways of dealing with duplicate content issues.

Similarly, you can find and fix other on-site issues on your site and improve your search engine visibility with improved rankings.

Aim to improve your website, traffic will follow.

Improving your rankings is not rocket science. It may take time to prepare strategies and execute them, but eventually, better rankings are evident.

However, it is always good to focus on traction more than the rankings because, in the end, it is the traffic that matters.

For instance, there are two pages both of them have quality content; they rank for the same keyword, have zero on-site issues, and excellent backlink profile.

Which one do you think Google will prefer ranking over the other?

In such cases, Google relies on the traffic and the session rate of each page. If one of the pages have 10K traffic and the other has 15K traffic with equal session rate, then Google will rank the page having 15K traffic higher in the SERPs.

Therefore, while you work on your ranking opportunities, you should aim to improve the traffic because it plays a vital role in rank boosting as well.

Conclusion

If you want to attain the top rankings on Google, you should target the keywords that you rank higher for already. You should focus on optimizing your site with uncompetitive and long-tail keywords to boost the process. But if you still find trouble attaining the top ranks, then you should find and fix the issues using the Site Auditor.

Do you have some questions? Let me know about them in the comments section below.

Author Bio
Sahil is the CEO and Founder of Rankwatch – a platform, which helps companies and brands stay ahead with their SEO efforts in the ever growing internet landscape. Sahil likes making creative products that can help in automation of mundane tasks and he can spend endless nights implementing new technologies and ideas. You can connect with him and the Rankwatch team on Facebook or Twitter.