Thread by @AlanGGorilla

A lot of people want to promote their content. But most people focus on the wrong pages.

Here’s how to prioritize pages for content promotion and link building:

1. Work out what kind of keywords you could rank for

Start by setting a Keyword Difficulty baseline and organizing keywords into buckets

We use @ahrefs KD metric for this.

(Shout out to @RobbieRichMktg 🙏🏻)

Here's how you determine the KD baseline:

A) Export your top-ranking KWs (position 1 to 3)

With a simple spreadsheet and graph you can visualize how many keywords you have in each KD level:

B) Define your KD buckets based on your distribution and what you see from the graph > the more keywords are in a KD level, the easier it will be to rank for that level.

Here are the buckets for that specific graph:

In this example:

- Most of our keywords are below KD 15.
- We're also doing a pretty good job with KWs below KD 40.
- We have some potential for keywords up to KD 70 as well.

2. Look for quick wins

Use @ahrefs to find what keywords you’re ranking for on pages 1-2.

These are your quick wins i.e the pages that have the most potential or ranking higher in 60/90 days or less.

Typically pos. 4-20

Can be 4-30 or even 4-50 for newer websites that have fewer pages ranking.

I like to use the Top Pages report from Ahrefs for this step because it shows only one page and its top-ranking keyword.

The drawback here is that the Top Pages report doesn't provide us with the KD for each keyword.

So, we need to get that separately by copy/pasting all of our keywords into the Keywords Explorer > Export the .csv and add the KD data to our KW file.

Now that we’ve got a complete list, let’s prioritize:

3. Build your keyword shortlist.

For each keyword, ask yourself:
a) Does your page match search intent?
b) Is the keyword relevant to your goals?

Reminder: Not all of your top-ranking keywords are going to be relevant to your business and content promotion goals.

A) Does your page match the keyword's search intent?

Here’s a common mistake:

You might be ranking for "pricing books" but your page is actually about "how to price a book" while the other pages that are ranking are about "the best books on pricing"

B) Is the keyword relevant to our goals?

You might be ranking for "author name" with an author page if that person is well known, but that doesn't mean you actually need that for your content marketing goals (i.e. the page doesn't convert).

To make sure you’re not doing this, add a "Relevant?" column to your spreadsheet where you can type YES/NO for each page.

4. Add conversion data to the list (number of leads + conversion rate)

If you have Analytics set up you can grab that data there

For newer sites, you can skip this step because you’re going to go after the low hanging fruits anyway

At this point your spreadsheet will look like this:

Now that you have your KW shortlist complete with conversion, traffic, and backlink data, it's time to use that data to identify your best opportunities.

I love using conditional formatting to highlight the best opportunities.

The closer to green a cell is, the better the opportunity.

I'm using it on the following columns:

- Ref. Domains: green = fewer RDs
- Position: green = ranking higher
- Volume: green = high volume
- Traffic value: green = higher value
- KD: green = lower KD
- Total Leads: green = more leads
- Conversion rate: green = higher CR

Look for keywords/pages that:

- don't have a lot of links already
- are ranking well
- have good search volume and traffic value
- have low KD (or within our KD baseline number)
- are bringing in leads
- are converting well

These are your final roadmap pages.

5. Prioritize the list

Here's how I do it:

A) Filter to only see one KD bucket at a time starting with the "easy" bucket.
B) Sort the position column from higher to lower and only 1-10.
C) Assign your priority order to these pages
D) Move on to the next KD bucket

6. Perform a deep-dive analysis

At this point, you have a prioritized shortlist of your top pages based on QUANTITATIVE data.

Now, you want to look at QUALITATIVE data.

Here's how I do this:

Add 3 extra columns to your spreadsheet (Search intent, Content-Type, Content Quality, and Compete):

A) Search intent/Content-Type:

- YES = MATCHES SERP
- NO = NO MATCH TO SERP

How to check:

1. Look at the target keyword and your target page in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer SERP overview.

2. Ask yourself:
- Does my page match the other pages ranking above it in terms of topic/intent and type (blog page, home page, landing page etc)?

Caveat:
- If not, does it at least have a unique or interesting angle to the topic? (Thanks @theandreboso for this)

B) Content Quality:

- YES = QUALITY OK
- IMPROVE = Surfer SEO Content Score < X = see recommendations

How to check:
1. Manually check the pates ranking above you.

2. Ask yourself:
- Does my page look better?
- Is my content more in-depth/useful?

3. Do a content audit using a tool like @surfer_seo to get a data-driven and actionable analysis.

C) Compete?

- YES = SCHEDULE THE PAGE IN YOUR ROADMAP
- NO = DISCARD THE PAGE

How to check:

- Simply put, if at least 2 out of the 3 checks you do are positive, then the page has the potential to compete.
- If not, then I would discard it (or schedule to completely rework the content).

To recap:

1. Work out what kind of keywords you could rank for
2. Look for quick wins
3. Build your keyword shortlist.
4. Add conversion data to the list (number of leads + conversion rate)
5. Prioritize the list
6. Perform a deep-dive analysis

This process allows you to:

1. Focus on the easiest KWs/pages first
2. Optimize them if needed
2. Push them up the rankings
3. Get more leads/conversions
4. Move to the more difficult KWs/pages
5. Repeat over and over as you publish more content

Now you can directly tie your content promotion/link-building efforts to increase revenue/ROI

This is so valuable. Now you can make a solid argument for that link building or promo budget.