There are around twenty opportunities for your site on the first page of the search engine results pages. Some of these are paid links. At least one is the one you aim for – your high-ranking optimised page for that keyword. That leaves eighteen or so other places on the page that your target user might click on. Are you willing to let these opportunities go?

Most businesses aim, with their SEO plan, to have one page ranking highly for each particular keyword. This kind of approach is slightly short-sighted. Achieving saturation in the SERPs is a more effective way to increase your search engine traffic. While this may seem a high aim for a humble search engine optimisation campaign, it’s one your business can easily strive for.

There are several approaches you can take when you want to place yourself in as many spaces on the SERPs as possible. Some of these are off-page strategies, and are quite similar to any strategy you have to create inbound links. Some of these, however, can be achieved within your own pages.

Most businesses will make maximum use of their pages by optimising for keywords on one page and driving other internal pages to support it. Optimising more than one page for a keyword can split the power of your other internal pages, but it can be worth it. Optimising two pages on your site for the same keyword can be all it takes to get two links on the SERPs instead of one. This is particularly true for the less competitive, long-tail keywords on your list. It can also consolidate the ranking of the lesser page, by dragging it up to nestle in an indented listing below the higher-ranking one. As Google will not feature more than two pages from the same domain in the SERPs, it is not worthwhile optimising more than two for a keyword. However, those two can help you bump competitors off the top ten.

Other options you have involve off-page solutions. You can grab a further spot with a paid listing, but getting multiple spots this way is difficult. Boosting your own pages from multiple domains can be tricky. Your inbound links are the real off-page solution for control of further spots on the SERPs. Well-designed off-page SEO strategies can see you seed your site’s keywords all into pages with inbound links, meaning that these linking pages have a chance of ranking for that keyword too. In doing this, you need to be careful not to compete with your own pages, and it can help to have professional advice. Talk to us at SEO Consult about your off-page SEO strategy.

You do need to be realistic in your aims for search engine optimisation. It’s unlikely that you will control more than one spot on the search engine results pages for competitive keywords. It is possible to control multiple spots for less competitive terms, however, and this is something you can easily fit into your SEO plan.

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