Gone are the days when you could just choose a low competition keyword,
toss up a 500 word article, sit back and watch the traffic roll in.
It takes a bit more work nowadays, and Karl from SaaS Growth Hacks Group
shared 2 approaches for this. The first is more efficient but requires
premium tools (SurferSEO and Ahrefs), while the other comes without cost
but is less reliable and more time consuming.
Method 1: Using SurferSEO and Ahrefs
+ Step 1: Decide on the main target keyword you want to rank for.
+ Step 2: Open SurferSEO, a handy tool that gives you a correlation analysis of the top 50 pages that rank for any given keyword.
It also gives you the exact data on the length of posts in various
positions, the words and phrases they use, the densities of these
keywords, the speed of their sites, and loads of other on-page SEO
factors.
+ Step 3: Decide on the intent behind the search term. Is Google
showing service-based pages, case studies, or educational pages for that
particular search term?
Once you have figured that out, you should be able to start planning the headline of your article.
+ Step 4: Set a word count goal. The “Words in paragraphs”
section on the sidebar of SurferSEO provides you with this info, so you
can set a word count goal based on that.
+ Step 5: Again, using the “A” button on SurferSEO, you can check
things like your competitors’ heading tags to effectively give you
their exact blueprint.
Go through all the top results in SERPs and repeat this process for each
of them, watching out for recurring themes. That way you will be able
to combine similar headlines and remove any irrelevant content based on
what the top ranking pages have in common.
+ Step 6: Because Google doesn’t just look for headlines but also
the other keywords used within an article, you can use the “Audit”
section to find articles on your site which aren’t ranking and discover
ways you can improve them.
Make sure to look out for “True Density” metric, which gives you a list
of related keywords you should be using and tells you how many times
they should be included in the article.
That’s all the research work you’ll need to start writing content that ranks well!
Again, read through the top 5 articles to get some additional insights
and see how deep they delve into each topic. Take notes on what stands
out, what you like, what you don’t like and try to improve on each of
these areas in your own content.
