Welcome to the lesson #3.
In this lesson I'm going to show you how to analyze the full traffic potential and ranking
difficulty of a keyword that you want to target with your article.
Here's a quick agendaю
I'll show you how to test your article ideas for the so-called "search demand" and how
to determine their full traffic potential.
The emphasis is on the word "full."
Then I'll give you a few simple tips on choosing the best keyword to target.
And finally, we're going to talk about analyzing your chances to rank in Google and the keyword
difficulty metric that we have in Ahrefs.
And just in case you're entirely new to SEO and this is the first time you hear about
the practice of keyword research, worry not!
I tried to make this lesson very newbie-friendly,
even though there will be quite a few rather advanced tricks in it.
So let's go!
Part 1: How to test your article ideas for "search demand?"
Can you guess what is the biggest mistake that newbie bloggers make?
They write articles about things that no one is searching for in Google.
And actually, newbie bloggers are not the only ones guilty of that mistake.
I see a lot of professional bloggers falling into that trap too.
Let me explain it with a short story, that happened recently.
I get a lot of emails from Ahrefs customers asking me for SEO advice.
And one day I got an email from a lady, who was a fantasy fiction writer.
She had published a few fantasy fiction books on Amazon, but she wasn't getting any sales.
So she started a blog, in order to get some traffic, build an audience of fantasy fiction lovers and sell
her own books to them.
She was publishing new articles quite regularly for almost a year, but her blog wasn't getting
any traffic, her audience wasn't growing and, as a result, she wasn't making any sales of
her self-published books.
So I opened her blog, to see what kind of articles she was publishing there and these
were basically short fantasy fiction stories or chapters from her upcoming books.
I mean the titles of her articles looked kind of like this:
"My new short story: "Two paladins and one sword."
"Chapter #12 from my upcoming book."
The progress on my "Flower of Ice and Fire" book.
These titles immediately explained why her blog wasn't getting any traffic and why her
audience wasn't growing.
As discussed in the first two lessons of this course, Google is the single best way to get
a consistent flow of new readers to your blog.
But how can you get visitors from Google, when no one is searching for what you're writing about?
I mean people don't even know that this lady exists in the first place.
How can they be searching for her articles in Google?
That said, the main reason she was struggling to get traffic to her blog was lack of search demand
for the things that she was writing about.
So does this mean that blogging is a bad customer acquisition channel if you're a book author?
Of course not!
You just have to blog about things that your potential readers are actually searching for
in Google, so that they could find your articles and become the regular readers of your blog,
and eventually buy from you.
Which was my advice to her almost word for word.
So what do readers of fantasy fiction books search for in Google?
After brainstorming for a few minutes and doing a simple keyword research exercise that
I'll show you a bit later, I found a few cool keywords that she could cover on her blog:
"books like harry potter," "books like the hobbit," "books like lord of the rings," "authors like terry pratchett,"
According to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer each of these keywords has some nice monthly search volume,
and "books like harry potter" is the most popular search query among them.
People search for it 3,700 times every single month in the US alone, and the global search
volume across all countries is 7,000 searches per month.
So by targeting these search queries with her blog posts she was almost guaranteed
to get a lot of highly-targeted visitors to her blog.
And because these searches clearly indicate that people are looking for book recommendations
and therefore willing to buy, she could easily squeeze recommendations of her own books into
her articles and make some sales this way.
So I hope my point is clear.
Writing about things that no one is searching for almost guarantees that your blog will be a failure.
You need to write about things that people are actually searching for in Google.
And that is why keyword research is such an essential thing to master for any blogger
or content marketer out there.