Thread by @KarthikS2206

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 :)

https://twitter.com/KarthikS2206/status/1384364616109625346