Content is king.
You can use content to nurture leads, drive organic traffic, increase your conversion rate, become a thought-leader, capture contact information, and provide your sales team with marketing collateral.
Here’s how we produce content that uses data to determine what your ideal buyer persona cares about, and has the highest probability of ranking on the first page of Google.
How We Rank #1 On Google in Three Simple Steps
Step #1: Identify Keywords You Want to Rank For
We may think we know what our target audience is searching for, but real data can tell us with certainty what’s actually being searched.
To determine what keywords your target audience is searching for, we use Ahrefs.com. You’ve probably never heard of Ahrefs.com, but many of the top SEO and content creation tools are built using integrations with Ahrefs.com databases.
Type in the keywords that you THINK your target audience is searching for.
Although this strategy works with any industry, healthcare, IT, accounting, legal, software, consulting, construction, etc., in the example below, I’ll be using “Weight Loss.”
After searching “Weight Loss,” Ahrefs.com provides me with exactly 811,528 keywords that I could target.
To identify the best keyword to rank for of the 811,528 provided, we’ll need to filter the available keywords.
KD = Keyword Difficulty. KD is a measure on a scale of 0-100 of how difficult it will be to rank for a specific keyword.
Volume = Monthly Searches Per Month. Knowing keyword volume will ensure you’re creating content targeting keywords your target audience is actually searching for often.
If you are a newer company or don’t already have a significant SEO presence, I’d recommend setting the KD to be less than 20 and the Volume to be no less than 1,000 searches per month.
Once you’ve applied these filters, sort the content by volume, and you’ll be able to quickly identify target keywords.
Our list of 811,528 keywords has now been reduced to 418 keywords, which is a much more manageable list.
Step #2: Determine the Ranking Criteria for chosen Keywords
Over 90% of web traffic will only ever look at the first page of the search results. That’s why it’s important to know a specific keyword’s ranking criteria, otherwise you’ll never make it to the first page of any search engine.
To determine the ranking criteria, we use a tool called Surfer SEO.
The Surfer SEO algorithms tell you exactly what you need to do to rank for a specific keyword. Surfer SEO’s recommendations include related keywords to include keyword frequency, word count, heading count, paragraph count, image count, and more (see image below).
Surfer SEO also tells you what other keywords to include in your content and how frequently.
Step #3: Create the Content
Now that you’ve picked your target keyword, and you know the ranking criteria, it’s time to produce the content.
Writing the content is easy since you know all of the criteria you’ll need to reach to rank on the first page of Google. If you’re ever in doubt, it’s always best to exceed the content requirements Surfer SEO provided.
After all, if you do manage to rank for a specific keyword, it’s likely that you’ll continue ranking for the specific keyword for months or years to come.
Once you produce the content, you can use Surfer SEO to grade it on a scale from 0-100.
In the example above, a score of 83/100 inside Surfer SEO was enough to rank our client #1 in Google for their target keyword (see the blue outline on the image below).
This was the first piece of content we produced for them, and after one month, the blog we created for them became their largest driver of organic traffic. It’s so popular, that the black outline on the image above is their homepage, which gets a third of the traffic our blog generates.
Final Thoughts
If you need help producing content monthly that drives results as measured by real data, please contact our team by submitting the form below.