Articles in the Content category cover everything related to SEO and content marketing – to help you get more inbound leads.
When starting out with content marketing, one of the first things you’ll to do is keyword research. After all, you’d like your articles to appear in the top Google’s search results.
Even after 2 years of working with content marketing, it’s still kind of a mystery to me why some search engine optimized articles start to rank and others won’t.
There’s no crystal ball to tell you which keywords start to bring thousands of organic visits every month. Although we all wish there was… ?
I recently happened to watch a video of CXL’s new Customer Acquisition Live Class with Dan Shure from Evolving SEO. There was a keyword research hack that particularly caught my interest. In fact, I think it was genius. And I immediately wanted to share it with anyone working on content or SEO.
So, here it comes, an SEO keyword research hack worth applying every single time.
Keyword Research with Domain Authorities
One of the main reasons your content never ranks high on Google as there are so many other websites with a much higher Domain Authority.
Domain Authority (DA) is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. The metric is calculated by combining all of Moz’s other link metrics—linking root domains, the number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc.—into a single score.
So, here’s a hack that makes a lot of sense, come to think of it.
When doing keyword research for new content or landing pages, add an extra step to the process.
1. Google your keywords
After you’ve found some keywords with a high enough search volume, head to Google and search for these.
Let’s say we’d like to create a list of Top Growth Marketing Blogs.
The Google search results page will look something like this:
While it’s a good general overview of the competition, there’s a simple way to learn even more.
2. Use the Moz SEO Toolbar
Use the Moz SEO Toolbar to get more insight about the articles in search results. Most of its features are free, simply add it to your browser.
As you click on it, the search results page gets a whole new look:
Now, you can see the Domain Authority and Page Authority of each website on the SERP (search engine results page).
The first two results have a Domain Authority of over 90 points. If your website isn’t hugely popular, you probably have the DA of 30-40 points. So, you can’t go against these giants.
3. Look for low domain authority websites ?
Google is not likely to rank your article higher than the first search results as their DA is so much higher than yours.
However, as we scroll down, there’s an article from a website with DA 28 on the third place in the list.
There’s also a website with DA 21 on the 7th place. Now that’s what we call a good omen.
Finding that some low DA articles rank high in competitive keywords search results is a sign that your article could potentially rank there as well.
4. Learn how to rank high with your content
Analyze what differentiates the content on the low DA website from all others.
Often, you’ll find that they’re 10x more comprehensive or have a more exact keyword match. This is what you’ll want to copy when creating content for the keyword.
Creating low-quality content with no clear value to the readers will not get you ranking in search engine results. You need to put in some real effort.
Not to keep this DO IT NOW post too long, let’s conclude it by naming a few marketing tools/websites whose content marketing is worth admiring and whose mindset worth copying: Drift, KlientBoost, AdEspresso, Moz, SumoMe, WordStream, ConversionXL, Unbounce.
Why do you think all the aforementioned brands are so well-known and trusted? It’s the high-quality content and advice they’re continuously putting out there. You can do the same.