I'm getting shockingly good rankings in broad searches, but strangely not doing much better in more specific ones. I'd like to know why that is.

My site is called the Badminton Bible. Here's an example; look at these two search results:

• badminton serve technique -- ranked 6 out of 154,000
• serve technique -- ranked 8 out of 22,900,000 (!)

And here's another one:

• badminton doubles tactics -- ranked 4 out of 111,000
• doubles tactics -- ranked 7 out of 10,600,000

What the bejeezus is going on? Do I just need to use the word "badminton" a few more times in my text? I'm aware this could be an issue, but can it really have that much influence?

The strange thing is that I'm thrashing my direct competitors in the really difficult rankings, but losing to them on the easy ones.

well.. I guess the "serve technique" can be applied to more than just badminton, and I take it (not sure though) tennis is more popular than badminton. As you can see there are a few sites above you on tennis, not on badminton.. that's why you dropped a few.. I guess..

Hi Mike,

Great rankings, congrats! I think the reason you're not seeing too big a difference might have to do with the order of keywords and the pipe | in between words. I would try to reinforce the three-word key phrases throughout the body of the content. You may dilute your two-word key phrases if you add them to to your <h>eaders. It may help join some of your paragraphs as well, but I'm not sure if you would see much difference.

Hope this helps!

Rich

Looking at the Badminton Singles Tactics page (which is your first link in your post), I was not able to find an h1.
I did see div's with the h1 in it but not a stand alone h1.
Use the words Badminton, Singles Tactics at the beginning of your h1.


The two headings above need more keywords. If Badminton is your keyword or singles tactics is your phrase of choice include it.

Your title looks excellent as wells as the meta description.

In this text
I would put in badminton for sure.
If you did not want it there, place the word in the first paragraph of content.

Take a look at who is beating you in the searches and see what they are doing and do it better.

That's an interesting thought.

I've not been especially consistent here. For example, I have one article with the front-page title/heading "badminton singles tactics", but another with the title "doubles tactics". I'm inclined to standardise on "badminton xxxx" for titles/headings, because I'd actually rather rank well on badminton-specific searches than on general ones (I want targeted traffic, not just random click-throughs).

Of course, I would only do this where it doesn't sound painfully forced.

When I next have time for some copy-editing, I'll look for places in the body text to reinforce those badminton-specific keyword phrases ("badminton singles tactics", "badminton serve"...). Does that sound like the right way to go?



Whoops! I pasted the wrong URL. Fixed.

Yes, my <h1> is nested inside a couple of <div>s. I don't believe that will make any difference. Having said that, I'm actually missing the <h1> on my homepage. Eek!

The <h1> on that page is actually "Badminton singles tactics".



Good call. To be honest, I haven't done any content SEO except for one article. I guess I should go through my remaining articles and make sure they have a sensible amount of "badminton". Actually, some pages may be so keyword-sparse that, if visitors deep link into them, they might not even realise it's about badminton...

Perhaps one reason for this strange mismatch in rankings is simply that I tend to drop the "badminton", and repeat the generic phrase instead in my body text -- so I use "doubles tactics" instead of "badminton doubles tactics".



In general this is good advice, and I should look for opportunities to apply it.

In many cases, however, doing this would be detrimental to my readers. Headings such as "an overview of this guide" are user-friendly; I'm using them to help orient my readers.

I believe my good rankings, my traffic, and my reputation are attributable to the quality of my content. My readers are the people who put me up there; if there's ever a conflict between their needs and Google's needs, I'm going to choose my readers every time.



These monkeys. I think their main advantage is comprehensiveness -- they have pretty weak content, but they cover a lot of common topics. I have the best content (I'm so modest), but my range of topics is small.