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Let’s get straight into it…
Our Go-To Strategy For Finding Easy Keywords to Target
We’re going to kick things off with one of my favorite strategies for finding super low competition topics that bring in tons of organic traffic.
I can already hear you saying “this cannot work for my industry because of X, Y, and Z”.
It can and it will.
In fact, we use this strategy ourselves to find topic ideas in one of the most competitive niches out there – SEO.
Is the suspense killing you yet? Let’s dig in.
Time to learn: 5 minutes
Impact (1-10): 7
Tools required: Ahrefs
If you’ve spent any time at all in the SEO world, you’ll know that backlinks are by far the most important thing when it comes to increasing your traffic.
You could have the greatest content in the world, perfect on-page SEO, and a bunch of social media activity but if your site doesn’t have any links to it, it’s not going to get much traffic.
Unless…
Once a website has a significant amount of links pointing to it as a whole, Google will start to trust it more and more.
This is what we call being an “authority”.
These authority sites will often be able to rank for low competition keywords without having to do any link building or sometimes even proper on-page SEO.
Awful, isn’t it? All these big brands stealing all of our traffic…
Not quite!
In most cases, this is a great opportunity for us to jump in with a highly-optimized page, with better content, and some backlinks to the page.
How to Find These “Unicorn” Keywords
As mentioned in the introduction, you’re going to need a tool called Ahrefs for this.
They’re the second most active web crawler in the world, after Google, and their only objective is to give SEOs and marketers data.
We’re going to use their computing power to our advantage.
You’ll want to head over to their Content Explorer and type in a keyword related to your site.
In this case, we’re working on an eCommerce site that sells outdoors equipment such as tents, hiking boots, and other gear.
I’m going to type in hiking as the keyword and then apply the following filters:
- Change search “Everywhere” to “In title” next to your keyword
- Set the language filter to “English
- Add a new filter for “Organic Traffic” for a minimum of 400
- Add a new filter for “Referring Domains” at 0
What comes up is a list of 32 different articles that are really low competition but getting a great amount of traffic.
Here are just a few topic ideas I covered that may be a fit for our eCommerce store and what keywords they rank for.
1. Hiking in Iceland | Iceland’s Best Hiking Routes
- Hiking in Iceland
- Best hikes in Iceland
Estimated traffic: 457
2. The Best Hiking Trails Near Sacramento, CA
- Hiking near Sacramento
- Best hikes near Sacramento
- Hiking trails near Sacramento
Estimated traffic: 860
3. Every Hiking Spot Near Cleveland You Need To Explore
- Hiking in Cleveland
- Best hiking in northeast Ohio
‘Cleveland hiking trails
Estimated traffic: 2,300
“Yeah but none of these keywords is going to get me any sales!!!!!”
That’s a whole other debate but here are some points to consider:
- Some will convert
- Ahrefs generally underestimates traffic by a third
- These pages will stay live and rank for months or years (it compounds)
- Most of these topics are 600 words and don’t take much time
But to counter your argument…
4. Best Hiking Pants for Women (Plus 8 Hiking Leggings)
I’m sorry but this one just screams money…
- Hiking leggings
- Hiking tights
- Best hiking pants for women
- Waterproof leggings
- Best hiking pants
- Best hiking leggings
More? Sure thing.
5. The 10 Best Hiking Sandals in 2019
- Best hiking sandals
- Closed-toe hiking sandals
- Best hiking sandals for men
- Best hiking sandals for women
Estimated traffic: 465
I’m going to stop now but here are a few more results I found just by typing in ONE keyword and going through ONE page of results (along with the ones mentioned before):
- The Best Hiking Shorts for Women of 2019
- The Best Waterproof Women’s Hiking Pants
- 10 best men’s waterproof trousers for walking and hiking
- The Best Hiking Shorts for Men of 2019
- This Hiking-Inspired Modular Backpack from Japan Sold out Instantly
Now go out there and start experimenting with different keywords and see what you can dig up.
Next time, I’m going to show you how to analyze your competitors’ articles to create an outline for an article that’s going to rank well in Google.
