Categories: Marketing

How to Use a 1 Keyword Link Building Strategy

A one keyword link building strategy is mostly known for the approach that concentrates on one keyword per page, which creates focus for SEO efforts and ideally produces better results.

But another approach focuses on one keyword (or keyword phrase) per site. Yes, one per site.

Let me explain what sounds like a crazy notion.

It begins with the benefit of having a highly disciplined focus on search engine optimization. The goal is simply to concentrate most if not all of the link building strategy on a single keyword for the site.

The effort continues until that keyword reaches its maximum potential, then moves on to the next keyword.

Why does that matter?

Too Many Keywords Dilute Efforts

Small businesses in particular don’t have the staff or budget to spend on a major SEO project that involves dozens or hundreds of keywords.

When a business owner or marketer discovers the number of keyword opportunities based on topic, geography or demographics, it becomes too easy to chase multiple keywords and dilute overall performance as a result of being spread too thinly.

Getting a high rank for a single keyword (or keyword phrase) takes a great deal of time and effort because of the intense competition online from other sites.

The number of websites and web pages continues to grow much more quickly than the growth of audience. So competition continues to climb even faster.

How to Apply the Link Building Strategy

Client audience data and research from other sources show that a page in the No. 1 position of Google search results can produce a 40 t0 50 percent click-through rate — and sometimes more.

Keyword clickthrough rates decline quickly in the second and third spots. A site with 10 pages all in the No. 10 position of Google are lucky to average a 1 percent click rate each.

So in that scenario, a single page in the No. 1 rank can generate five times the click of 10 pages in the No. 10 rank.

Focusing on a single keyword can produce far better results than focusing on 10.

Various steps produce top-level results:

Build a page with authority using original content including text and images.
Optimize the page for search engines so that the keyword appears in the document title, article title and body text among other places.
Produce high-quality and high quantity internal links to that page.
Seek high-quality and high quantity external links to that page.
Encourage social sharing of the content.
Post content on social media with the keyword’s hashtag.
Track the results and keep improving and promoting the content.

Risks of Focusing on One Keyword

There are risks with this approach to focusing on just one keyword.

The keyword has too much competition from sites with higher authority.
The external links will vanish for some reason — the site is closed, the page has been changed, etc.
After moving on to other efforts, the keyword is forgotten and drifts away.

It’s also possible to choose the wrong keyword. Newcomers often chase after a keyword (or phrase) that has hundreds if not thousands of monthly searches. In those cases, the competition for No. 1 will be so intense that a small business is highly unlikely to rank well.

It also is possible to concentrate on a keyword and find that there aren’t enough good external links that will boost the rank. In that case, moving on to other keywords is the obvious option.

Scott S. Bateman