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Step by step SEO guide for organic traffic!

Paid advertising is great and all, but it stops once the money stops. I'm going to show you a step by step guide on how to do keyword research and use that to your advantage to create compelling articles that could potentially grow organically.

To do this, I'll use Splitbee as an example, it's a web analytics tool. (No, I am not affiliated with them, just picked a random startup from the recent post created by @rosiesherry).

๐ŸŽฏ Identifying your competitors

You need to first have an idea of who your competitors are in the market. A quick search on Google shows Clicky to be a similar service. Great, you've identified one competitor, we need more. Head over to SimilarWeb, search for your competitor's website, and scroll down to competitors. Pick 3-4 competitors and write them down somewhere.

๐Ÿ“ Finding the keywords

You have 3-4 competitors written down, time to know what they're ranking for. Head over to UberSuggest, search for your competitors, scroll down until you see 'View all SEO keywords this domain ranks for", click, now click on 'Export to CSV'. You now have a list of keywords in a searchable file. Do this for all your competitors.

๐Ÿ” Narrowing down the keywords

You'll most likely have hundreds of keywords in 1 CSV file. Import your CSV file into Excel. Apply conditional formatting to these columns:

1- Volume > 1000
2- Position < 20
3- SEO Difficulty < 40

You're basically narrowing down to keywords that receive traffic, are ranked either in the first or second page, and are not too difficult to rank for. Do you just go ahead and create an article with all the keywords you've just narrowed? No. There's still more work to do!

โœ”๏ธ Validating the keywords

After you've narrowed down the keywords, it's time to validate the keywords via Google Trends and/or Google Keyword Planner. Go to Google Trends and search for the keywords you've just narrowed and make sure to set the region to Worldwide. For example, I now have a keyword 'web stats site'. Is it receiving enough interest? Google's metric is /100. Most popular is 100, least popular is 0, and 50 is half-half. My keyword is spiking, at times it's 90, others 40, and sometimes 0. That's okay, we can gamble.

I now have 1 validated keyword, it's receiving > 1000 traffic per mo, it's relatively low positioned, and isn't difficult to rank for.

๐Ÿ–Š๏ธ Writing your articles

Now....do you just use the keyword 'web stats site' in your title? No. Be creative. Write a blog article about 'Analyzing web site stats with Google Analytics'. Sometimes the keywords don't make sense, run it through Ubersuggest again and look through the 'Keyword Ideas' section, maybe you'll find a better keyword.

I hope this was a somewhat helpful post to get you into keyword research and planning. It's a great boost and I think you should take advantage of it to boost your organic traffic!

Sorry for not linking directly to the websites used, need better reputation for that

  1. 2

    Keeping this for my content marketing efforts :) Thanks

    1. 1

      You're welcome, glad you found this useful!

  2. 1

    Nice overview. Just butting in to bring up the importance (and relatively easy work) of manually writing your page title (and meta description) tags โ€” at least for your most important pages.

  3. 1

    I'm new here, how do I bookmark a post on here so that I can find it later?

  4. 1

    Nice post Moemin, Iโ€™m not sure I could boil down the basics much more than this!

    Iโ€™ve actually been working on a service for indiehackers called Keywords Fast that provides all of the research (and more) so you can focus purely on the content. We show you who your competitors are, what you rank for, and the big revenue-generating searches for your industry.

    1. 1

      Looks like a really helpful tool, thanks for sharing!

  5. 1

    This is great, thank you for posting. I know very little about SEO as yet but keen to learn more down the track. Bookmarking this!

    1. 1

      You're welcome, glad you found this useful!

  6. 1

    Thank you! Really Useful!

    1. 1

      Glad you found this useful!

  7. 1

    Hey @muchkler, I just finished this page which has a very quick video on the "why and how-to," and shows how to spin an entire social campaign of many unique selling posts from one blog post: https://help.ritekit.com/en/article/how-to-spin-one-blog-post-or-web-page-into-many-social-posts-that-sell-with-the-ritekit-package-1fy3xmb/

    See it and then, any questions, I'm happy to help. After all, I'm still indie - and I do 100% of the social media marketing, what has kept RIteKit in business for 9 years, myself.

    I thought this would be relevant to your objective on getting the most out of a blog post.

    1. 2

      Really helpful article, thanks for sharing.

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