How to Write a Blog Post That Actually Gets Traffic from walken's blog

 

So for our example, "how-tos" are the dominant format. The final C is content angle. The angle is often depicted in the title as the "benefit" as to why someone should click and read their article. So this page is talking about creating "perfect" pancakes, this one is pushing the "easy pancakes" angle, and this one down here is about "fluffy pancakes." Generally speaking, you don’t want to stray too far from the angle that the top 10 results are taking, but note that angles will vary from topic to topic. Now, just to show you how important this step is, let’s type "slow cooker," into Google. Immediately, you’ll see that the search results are dominated by Ecommerce category pages. If you don’t have a similar page on your site, you probably shouldn’t target the keyword, because your chances of ranking will be slim to none. We have a full tutorial on doing keyword research, assessing search intent, and also knowing how hard it will be to rank on Google, so I highly recommend watching that tutorial which I’ll link up. For now, let’s move on to step 3, which is to write a data-driven outline. A data-driven outline might sound strange, but hear me out. A page doesn’t rank for just one keyword. In fact, our data shows that on average, the #1 ranking page also ranks for nearly a thousand other keywords.


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 So when you’re creating your outline, it’ll pay to know which keywords the top ranking pages are ranking for so you can get the most mileage out of your blog posts. To do this, go to Keywords Explorer and search for the target keyword you want to rank for. Then scroll to the bottom of the page, where you’ll see the top 10 ranking pages along with their SEO metrics. And as expected, a bunch of these pages are ranking for thousands of keywords. To see the keywords that this page ranks for, let’s click on the number in the corresponding row, which will open up the Organic Keywords report in Site Explorer. Now, to keep these keywords relevant, let’s set a filter to only show keywords that rank in position 1 through 10. This will weed out a lot of irrelevant keywords that we don’t need to target. A few interesting words that pop out to me are "from scratch," "recipe," and "batter." Now, rather than trying to stuff these keywords into your post, it’s best to think of these as subtopics. You can also use them to solidify the angle you want to take for your post. So I may take the angle of creating homemade pancakes from scratch. As for the subtopics, I would likely have a section on "making the batter." And under the subheadings, I may include descriptive words people are searching for like "delicious and fluffy." And I may even include a substitute to make the batter without milk. Finally, just add some bullet points below each of the subheadings to ensure that you stay on topic once you get to writing the draft. Speaking of which, let’s move on to step 4 and that’s to write your first draft. 

Right away, you’ll see some great keyword ideas like "blueberry pancakes recipes," "how to make blueberry pancakes," and "vegan blueberry pancakes" along with keyword metrics like search volume beside them. Now, the thing with search volume is that it can be a bit misleading. For example, "how to make blueberry pancakes" gets 1,000 monthly searches in the US alone. Now, if we click on the SERP button, and look at the traffic column for the top ranking pages, you’ll see that these pages get significantly more traffic than the estimated search volume. And this often happens because these pages are ranking for hundreds or even thousands of keywords. Now, if we look at the SERP for the keyword, "vegan blueberry pancakes," you’ll see the opposite effect. Top ranking pages only get around 27% traffic compared to the main keyword’s search volume. This is why it’s critical to look at the total traffic potential of a topic so you can get the most bang for your buck. Now, this is just one topic you might want to write about. You can generate a whole list of content ideas by entering a more generic topic related to your niche. So let’s change this to "recipes." And just like that, you have a list of over 2.4 million keywords that contain the word "recipes." Let’s narrow this down to some low-competition topics with high search volume.


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By walken
Added Oct 5 '22

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