23/10/2023
Today I want to share how we ranked for a national keyword that gets 10,000 searches per month.
Here’s how we did it:
1. Find a keyword that we can actually rank for
Shocking, I know.
But you need to spend so much time qualifying your keyword targets.
It’s much more efficient (and smart) to target keywords your website is capable of ranking for.
You will waste time, money, and effort going after competitive keywords.
If you have a super strong website, then it sometimes makes sense to tackle monster keywords.
But for 99.9% of campaigns, it’s much easier to target low-competition keywords.
Then, as your website authority grows, you can go after the big ones.
I’ve shared an enormous amount of information about keyword qualification inside my One on One SEO Training, but here are 3 quick tips:
☑️Quickly filter through keywords based on Keyword Difficulty (KD)
Ahrefs KD score from their Keyword Explorer is scary effective. I’ll explain why in a second.
But you can easily filter through thousands of keywords using KD alone.
I set the filter on Ahrefs to show keywords that have a KD < 10. I’ve found that this is the sweet spot. If your site doesn’t have much authority, set it to < 5.
Once you’ve found an uncompetitive keyword, then next step is to:
☑️Analyze your competitors at a high-level
Gather averages for the top 10 competitors for their website authority, total links hitting their target page, word count, etc.
Then compare those averages against your websites.
If the gaps are too big, then reconsider. If your keyword passes the high-level analysis, then it’s time to:
☑️Perform a deep competitor analysis
You’ll need to go page-by-page and see what the competitors are doing well or not doing well. All of this information should go into an SEO content brief.
2. Create an Intelligent SEO Content Brief
I highly recommend you create a template for your SEO content briefs. It should include some of the following key points:
☑️What are the lag goals for this content?
Lag goals are goals that you can’t control right now such as keyword rankings and more organic search traffic.
☑️What’s the search intent?
Identifying the intent of your keyword should dictate your strategy. You put most keywords in four buckets: informational, transactional, comparison, and navigational.
☑️What’s the ideal word count?
See what competitor has the biggest word count and make your target 2x bigger than theirs.
☑️How many backlinks will we need?
Here’s the exact phrase I used in my SEO content brief for this point: “Based on Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty tool, we will need at least backlinks to rank for this keyword phrase.”
These 4 of 22 points that I tackle within my SEO content brief template. You can get access to this proven template as a member of My One on One training Program.
Now let’s move onto the step that’s super interesting.
3. Acquire Backlinks
So based on Ahrefs KD score, we needed backlinks from ~ 2 websites to rank in the top 10.
I wanted to put this to the test. So we found a few link opportunities and acquired backlinks on two websites.
Then we waited.
We published this SEO content asset on November 14th and it reached the first page on December 19th.
Pretty cool, right?
And for good measure, we repeated this same process with another keyword on the same website.
Same result:
I’ve used Ahrefs’ KD score for a long time, but never this specifically. It’s crazy how well it works when you follow it.
Now keep in mind:
Just acquiring backlinks isn’t enough.
The real magic happens BEFORE you acquire links. In other words, you need to know how to create effective SEO content.
That’s the lead domino.
It simply won’t matter how many backlinks you get if you don’t get your content right.
Any way:
If you’de like to learn how to rank on the first page of Google (whenever you want), check out my one on one consultation services.
Talk soon,
Ayobami.
P.S. The links we acquired are the exact links we offer in our curated links service.
