The best way to start building an audience through SEO is to look at what is already ranking and getting traffic, then look to replicate/beat out that website. But how do you do that?
In this article I’m going to show you what you need to look for, and how to build out pages that are going to outrank your competitors using tools like Ahrefs & SurferSEO.
Where should you start?
For this example, I’m going to imagine I’m a company that sells “air purifiers” and look at opportunities I can to grow my audience and sell more of my products.
So before we create any content we have to plan what we’re going to go after, so I’m going to go over to the “Keywords Explorer” within Ahrefs which looks like this:
Let’s start looking for some opportunities that we can work towards ranking, keep in mind my example company is new in the game so we’re also going to be realistic on what we want to rank.
Yikes…
Although we would LOVE to rank for this keyword, it’s just not realistic. In this article, I’m going to try and show you actionable advice, and simply building better pages isn’t all that is required when dealing with super-competitive keywords.
Let’s have a look for some more realistic keywords:
This is more realistic, and it is also feasible that people in the research phase of searching will then turn to use to buy a purifier after finding out the benefits of “what does an air purifier do”.
Ok, so we’ve found a keyword that we want to go for, what are the next steps?
How can we make sure that we’re creating the content that Google is looking for, are they displaying videos? Long-form content? Short quick answers?
We have to do a quick audit of the pages ranking to see what the searcher intent is:
Above is a snapshot of the top 10 results, having a look at the top results it would seem long-form content is winning this. So we have a keyword, we know what type of content we need to create, is there anything else?
This is where a new tool helping us with on-page SEO comes in, SurferSEO.com.
This tool will help us build out brilliant content for our website that Google will love, and it will also help us target longtail keywords at the same time. So let me show you how it works:
Once we put in our keyword, we’re going to be given a report that looks like this.
What it does is put all the top results for this keyword together to find a trend, so you can see the ideal length among other things lets take a dive into the audit of one of these pages and see what we can find out for our own page.
From the GIF above, you can see all the keywords Google expects from our article, the common backlinks that the top 50 pages for this keyword have.
It also breaks down the headers on the page, should have more keyword focused ones? Also, it gives us a great idea of the ideal length of our article.
Using this data we can go and build a great page that answers the question the searcher is asking and fills all the needs Google has when it comes to ranking any certain page.
Richard Kennedy runs Arken Marketing, an SEO agency in the United Kingdom.