Early this year, we hit $1 million in revenue and SEO contributed >50% of our leads.
In fact, from July last year, our traffic has increased ~10 times to 40k+/month.
Today, I am sharing my secret 8-step playbook of how I did it!
Thread 🧵
Before we start, the only tools that we would be using are:
1. @ahrefs
2. Google sheets
Step 1/
- Type a relevant industry keyword in @ahrefs' keyword explorer tab
- Keep the keyword short - NOT long-tail
- At this stage, you are just defining the kind of articles you want to write
- For e.g. If I want to write tech articles, I'd just search "Javascript"
Step 2/
- This is simple - go to the "Having same terms" tab
- You will get all results which have your keyword phrase in it
- For our e.g., "Javascript" will be included each time
- You can go back to Step 1 if you think the keywords are out of whack
Step 3/
In the results, put in two filters:
- Keyword Difficulty (KD) < 10
- Monthly Traffic > 1000
We can keep a lower KD and higher traffic cut-off based on the no. of results.
- As is clear, the goal is to ensure that we get the lowest difficulty keywords with max volume
Step 4/
- Export this into a CSV
- But here's the clincher => Do remember to export the SERP results also
- Copy & paste these results into a google sheet
- Let's call this “Javascript SERP"
SERP just represents the top 10 results that show up in Google for a keyword
Step 5/
- Now, in a new sheet tab, let's say "Javascript", we need to list all the keywords (without the SERP) in Column A
Other simple columns:
- Col B: Has keyword difficulty
- Col C: Has volume
Other columns in the next tweet 👇🏼
Step 6/
Other columns:
- Col D: No. of websites that have a domain rating (DR) lesser than your website
- Cold E: The DR of the website with the least DR in the SERP results
Let me explain the rationale and how to do it 👇🏼
Step 6 rationale/
- KD calculated by various tools is not fully reliable
- So on top of low KD keywords, you should ensure that there are other websites with a DR lower than you in the SERP results
- This ensures that you can "beat" that website and rank for that keyword
Step 6 rationale (contd.)/
- For e.g. @Flexipletweets' DR is 46
- So, I need to ensure that in the SERP results, there is at least one website with a DR lesser than 46
- This increases my chances of ranking greatly!
Step 6 execution/
Col D: Use the "minifs" formula to get this value from the "Javascript SERP" tab
Col E: Use the "countifs" formula to get this value, again from the other tab
Step 7/
- Filter results to only include those keywords that have at least one website with DR less than yours in SERP
- Basically, filter Col D
- Next sort Col D in descending order
Rationale: More the number of results with DR lesser than yours, higher the chance of ranking
Step 8/
Final step:
- Comb through the keywords and remove useless keywords
This should be done by:
- First cursory look
- Next, go through the websites already ranking and check if their content is relevant to your industry
🎉🎉You have got your amazing list of keywords🎉🎉
OVERALL/
Now, keep repeating this entire process by replacing the keyword you entered in Step 1.
This will keep churning out a set of really quality keywords :)
FINAL/
So, that's it for this thread. If you would like to see more such threads - retweet the first tweet 👇🏼
I plan to keep sharing many hard-earned lessons from my startup, so do follow me :)
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