Market Place and Plan

Happy new year.

It’s that time. You dust off the journals neglected in the end-of-the-year rush. You locate the gym membership card and wonder if it will still scan since it’s been a few months – or maybe a few years, given the concern about being around people. And you create New Year’s resolutions.

Or maybe you don’t.

Have you come up with your 2023 word yet?

Resolutions seem so old school. Instead, pick one word to summarize your intentions and hopes for the new year. I’ve been doing it for about 20 years, and it’s worked well.

My yearly word sets the foundation for where I want to focus. It acts as the root of all the intentions I write in my new year journaling.

My word for 2023: balance.

But it may not be the balance you think.

@Robert_Rose’s word for 2023 is balance. But it might not

Grammarly is a writing assistant. According to our data, its website gets an estimated 22.2M monthly search visits across 2,468 published pages.

If Grammarly bought this same traffic via Google Ads, it would cost an estimated $5.1M per month.

In this post, I’ll share 11 takeaways from my deep dive into the company’s SEO strategy. 

Grammarly gets an estimated 7.8M monthly search visits from search queries containing the phrase “grammarly.” That’s 38.6% of its total organic traffic.

Ironically, however, it gets at least a further 590K monthly searches for keywords containing brand misspellings.

Given that it has 30M daily users (by its own estimates), this is hardly surprising. In fact, there are over 37K queries in our U.S. keyword database containing “grammarly” with a total estimated monthly search volume of 3.1M. 

Grammarly’s homepage

The difference between long-tail and short-tail keywords comes down to popularity. Many people search for short-tail keywords, while few search for long-tail keywords.

Because of that, long-tail keywords are generally easier to rank for and tend to attract searchers with more specific intent. This has made targeting them a widely adopted SEO tactic. 

So should you follow suit and prioritize long-tail keywords at all times? 

It’s not about how many words they contain or how specific they are. 

Short- and long-tail keywords got their respective names from the position on the “search demand” curve. 

If we take all search queries that people have performed in Google in the course of a month and order them by their search volumes, it’ll look somewhat like this:

As you can see, long-tail keywords are literally in the “long tail” of this graph. It’s because they are

Don’t expect Google to take a sabbatical this year.

Do expect SEO to be more nuanced than ever in 2023.

My best advice? Track your SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) more often to identify positive or negative trends in your organic results.

But don’t worry about every shift in search rankings because they fluctuate. Pages that drop could quickly rebound a month later, even if the fall happened because of one of Google’s frequent algorithm tweaks.

Instead, focus your SEO strategy on producing as much useful and original content as possible.

I stop short of saying “quality” content because that’s subjective. Google doesn’t give a good explanation in its guidelines championing quality content. Does “quality” refer to exceptional writing, the depth of content on a page, the design of a page, or other factors?

If you provide relevant, original content that answers searchers’ questions and addresses their concerns, you’ll