Low hanging Keywords are search terms that are well within your reach. They refer to words and phrases that your website is already ranking for—and have the potential to bring qualified traffic—but haven’t quite reached the coveted Google search top spot. Targeting these keywords is a good strategy as it often requires comparatively less work and a faster return on your investment.

Focusing your optimization efforts on keywords that give you actual traffic and conversions is a much better use of your resources. Let’s say, that you’re ranking 70th for one keyword and 15th for another. Putting in a little more work into the 15th ranked keyword gives you a much better shot at reaching the top. But even if you spend countless hours on the 70th ranked keyword and get it to jump 40 places up, it will still pull less traffic than the other keyword (even if search volume is larger).

Knowing exactly which search terms your website is ranking for is an important step to identifying low-hanging keywords and refocusing your SEO efforts. Below are step-by-step instructions on checking your organic search traffic so you can pinpoint the exact keywords you are ranking for and discover key positions within your immediate reach.

• Open your Google Search Console. Google Search Console & Google Analytics are exceptional tools for checking how well your website and web pages are performing online.
• Select the site you want to check up on.
• On the left menu bar, toggle “Search Traffic” and then select “Search Analytics”. Doing this will instantly give you a list of keywords that are bringing in the most traffic for your site at the moment.
  Note: Google Search Console can provide you with an expanded list should you wish to check for your top 20, 50, or even 100 to 500 keywords. This may be essential if you have a content-rich site. However, in most cases, knowing your top 10 keywords should be enough for what you want to accomplish—that is, boosting rankings for keywords that you are already ranking for. These are the keywords that are generating the most number of click-through to your website.
• Download the list in a CSV file, which you can then copy and paste to another statistical program of your choice. You may also see your average keyword rankings, which is also useful to understand where such terms already rank.
• Alternatively, you can use SEMRush which gives a list of all the keywords the site is ranked for. From this list, you can consider including the keywords that are ranked from Page2-Page5 into your optimization. Although, you need to have a paid SEMRush subscription to access this data.

You must also have a good rank tracking tool that can use to determine your site’s exact position for the given keyword. This rank tracker module will help you pinpoint your current standing keywords in your list of traffic-generating terms. Rank tracker modules also allow you to track your progress as you continue to optimize.

Once you’ve finalized the low-hanging keywords to target and the rank tracking in place, making their landing pages a priority will help you build a stronger foundation for your link-building and content optimization efforts, enabling you to substantially increase position and traffic on the same pages—which also adds to their perceived authority.

Using rank tracking modules is also a great way to do market research and competitor analysis on rival pages that are ranking above you as well as for targeting and prioritizing keywords that are easier to rank for. Looking for your Low Hanging Keywords is the first step to making your traffic boosting optimization efforts and strategies stronger than your competition’s.