In my last post, I proposed that Steemit could double the number of visitors it gets from organic searches if enough of us got together and started creating content around keywords that get a lot of searches per month, but that don't have a lot of websites competing for those keywords.
In today's post, I will be going through the keyword research process that I laid out in the last post and I will be finding 10 new keywords that I will target with content here on Steemit.
My goal with these posts are to provide anyone who wants to help bring Steemit (or themesleves) more organic traffic with a clear-cut way to do so. Not only am I going to present a plan on how I think we can get Steemit more traffic, but I'm also going to carry the plan out and share my results.
If you haven't read the introductory post on my strategy, you can click the link below to check it out:
Steemit Gets 4,500,000 Visitors from Searches Per Month. Here's How We Can Double It.
A Quick Glance At the Plan
Just to bring you up to speed, here are the two simple steps I will take (and, hopefully, you will, too, if you want to join me) in order to try and bring Steemit more organic traffic:
- Find 10 keywords that get 1,000+ searches per month and have a keyword difficulty score of less than 7 (according to AHREFS)
- Create 10 new articles that target those keywords and post them on Steemit
Since these keywords don't have a lot of competition, my theory is that with Steemit's significant domain authority, it shouldn't be too difficult to rank for them.
How I Will Find the Keywords
As I laid out in the previous article, I'm going to find these keywords using AHREFS. Here is the step-by-step process again:
- Plug a site like Reddit.com or Quora.com (or any other site you want) into AHREFS
- Pull up all of the keywords that the inputted sites rank for
- Filter the results to only show keywords that have 1,000+ searches per month and that have a keyword difficulty score of less than 7.
- Apply further filters (exclude keywords that contain the word 'reddit', remove single-word keywords, etc.) to narrow down the list of keywords
- Manually go through the remaining keywords and choose 10 to write content around.
So, with that being said, let's start looking for keywords that A) meet the criteria laid out above, and B) are related to topics that I can write about.
Finding 10 Keywords
I posted screenshots of the process outlined above in the last post. But, I'll go over everything again in case you didn't read that post.
So, to start, let's plug Reddit into AHREFS and start filtering out the results.
I've used a bit more aggressive of filters. But, once I have my filters applied, I will just start manually browsing through the keywords.
Any keywords that I find, I will put into a spreadsheet, along with the volume and keyword difficulty metric.
After spending some time looking through Reddit, I will now switch over an look for keywords that match the same criteria that Quora is ranking for.
You can also quickly find keywords that are relevant to the topics you want to write about by using the "include" filter.
This will show you everything that Quora.com (or Reddit.com) is ranking for that A) matches your other filters (keyword difficulty, estimated search volume, and ranking on page one), and B) that contain a specific keyword.
So, for instance, I put "CPU" into the included filter and now I can see only the keywords that contain "CPU" in it that Quora is ranking on page one for.
This can make it a lot quicker to find keywords that are related to the specific topics you want to write about.
All of the Keywords That I Came Up With
I was actually able to come up with quite a bit more than 10 keywords that matched my criteria. But, I have narrowed the list down further to topics that I feel would be the easiest for me to write on.
They are:
(keyword / volume / keyword difficulty)
set cpu priority to prefer foreground apps / 35,000 / 0
gpu boss / 33,000 / 3
can i run overwatch / 12,000 / 0
how to clean a mouse pad / 6,500 / 1
what is pu leather / 24,000 / 1
windows 10 sucks / 17,000 / 0
dual cpu motherboard / 4,900 / 0
normal cpu temp while gaming / 1,100 / 0
how to start a gaming channel / 1,500 / 1
best resolution for gaming / 1,100 / 3
In total, these keywords combine to get an estimated 136,100 searches per month.
Now, even if I ranked in the 1st position in Google for all of those keywords, it would be impossible to get 100% of the people searching for those keywords to click on my articles.
Not everyone clicks on the 1st result.
There are typically 10 total results that show up on the first page of Google's search results. The higher you are in the results, the higher the share of traffic you will get from that keyword.
But, as long as I can rank on the first page for those keywords, I should be able to bring in some traffic.
Other Variations of the Keywords Will Bring in Traffic As Well
The estimated 136,100 searches per month only refers to the specific keywords listed above. Any variations of those keywords is not counted.
For instance, I chose the keyword "what is pu leather," which gets an estimated 24,000 searches per month. But, the term "pu leather" gets 51,000 searches per month and also has a keyword difficulty score of 3.
So, even if I just wrote content that targeted the 10 keywords listed above, there is the potential to rank for a ton of more variations of those keywords, which means the traffic potential is likely much greater than 136,100 searches per month.
What to Do If You Don't Have AHREFS
AHREFS makes this entire process incredibly easy. However, the tool costs quite a bit of money ($99/month) for their basic plan.
They do offer free trials, though. And, if you haven't used their free trial yet, you can use that to find all the keywords you need for this strategy. Then, just cancel it after you've come up with a list of keywords to write content on.
If you've already used up your free trial for AHREFS, but you still want to join me in trying to get more organic traffic to Steemit, let me know that you need help with the keyword research in the comments (or message me), and I will work with you to come up with a list of 10 keywords you can target.
Now, I Just Have to Start Writing Content!
The keyword research is really the easy part of this process. Now that I have the keywords, I just need to write a quality piece of content for each of the 10 keywords I have selected.
So, in the next post in this series, I'll go over how I structure and write my content, as well as how I try to make it SEO-friendly.
Once all of the content is written and posted, I will come back with follow-up posts that track where my content is ranking in the search results. That way, you'll not only see how to apply this strategy to your own future Steemit posts, but you'll also have proof (hopefully) that it will work for you.