Hi.
We’ve recently started blogging for 6 months, housed in Norway, which is a small country. Our pillar page has 8 conneced topic clusters, properly set up with their backlink to the pillar page. Our pillar page and keyword we’re ranking for is “healthy food.” Google has crawled us 3 days ago, and again last night, so we should be indexed by Google with the most up to date structure.
I cleared my browsing cookies, opened an incognito window, and typed in our keyword. There are only 45 pages or so of results in Norwegian. I clicked through each page with a Ctrl+F to find the first words in our pillar page’s title. Sadly, we don’t even exist in any of these result pages (not even in last place).
Any ideas what’s going on, or what to attempt in order to even exist in the running for this keyword? Thanks!
Hi @JNeubrander. When setting up your keyword strategy, did you all use tools like Semrush to check competitiveness and such?
Without looking deeply into all you all have done, it’s hard to say exactly what’s going on. I’d look at the competitive score, how many other pages are ranking and why, and think about maybe narrowing the focus. “Healthy food” feels really broad and hard to rank for.
Thanks for your thoughts and time. We primarly used HubSpot to look at “competitiveness” but we also checked other free online tools (ahrefs, etc.)
“Healthy food” monthly search volume = 4,400 with a difficulty score of 26.
My bewilderment is that we don’t even show up at all… so I wonder if there was an obvious mistake baring us from entering the competition.
@JNeubrander while I’m not and SEO expert, I’ve worked on SEO for years with clients and for companies I’ve worked for. I’ve also used HubSpot for years. So I have ideas and experience, and may be able to offer some help/ideas. It’s hard to do over text though. There’s a meeting link in my signature for 15 minutes if you want to book a chat with me. I can look over what you have and maybe we can find the problem together.
As to how broad “healthy food” is, we face the problem that 1) Norway is a small country (making lower search volumes), 2) what we offer (11 day live-in lifestyle programs) is basically nothing anyone is searching for (like prevention, how to avoid getting chronic diseases), and 3) the broad search terms have more volume, and are easier to rank for than in the States, but they are not well-qualified by any means… so we’re only hoping to glean low-hanging fruit I suppose.
For the life of us, we can figure out what our personas are googling to find us, and it doesn’t seem that any of our current customers are - it’s all word of mouth referrals.