Let’s say you have an article which is already ranking really well for your target keyword, perhaps you’re getting 100 page views a day from this one article. How would you like to double or triple your page views with only a small amount of effort?
That’s exactly what I’m going to show you how to do in this tutorial by showing you how I augment existing articles to boost traffic and revenue.
As an SEO enthusiast and a big believer in content marketing, one of my favorite things to do is using the wealth of tools available on the internet to their fullest potential.
In this tutorial, I’ll be using Ahrefs, but Semrush and Moz also work just as well.
Search Relevance Matters
Google has categorically stated in the past that search relevance is an important ranking factor. In fact, there have been specific algorithm updates to address search relevance, increasing the rankings for websites that have better on-page relevance.
Knowing how search relevance works is a powerful tool and can greatly increase your website’s rankings.
I believe one of the best ways to improve search relevance is by augmenting your existing posts and pages.
In a nutshell, this means adding content and information to articles related to a keyword that you’re already ranking for, but just not as high in the search results as you’d like.
Targeting keywords that you’re already ranking for increases your search relevance because google already thinks these terms are related.
This method is completely white hat and doesn’t require any additional link buildings.
It’s also:
- Tested and proven to work. I use it for all my websites.
- Guaranteed to work. Page views will increase.
- Safe to use. You’re not changing schema, deleting content, or adjusting anchor texts.
- Future proofs your website. If you continually augment your content, your articles become longer, more relevant, and incredibly difficult for your competitors to beat.
Best of all, it’s easy to do and requires next to no effort. You don’t need to dive into time-consuming outreach programs or risk your existing rankings by changing your site architecture.
Rank Higher And For More Keywords
To achieve our goals we’re going to use data to drive our decision-making process, maximizing our success while keeping guesswork out of the equation.
Take a look at the article featured above, I supplemented my articles on Crow Survival with additional content driven by targeting keywords we were already ranking for, but not in the top 10. Within a week traffic spiked and continued to increase.
Let’s take a look at the exact method I used to increase our page views.
Finding The Right Keywords To Target
My tool of preference for this is Ahrefs. There are a host of other tools you can use, including Semrush, but Ahrefs is by far my favorite.
These tools cost money to use, but you can always sign up for a trial version, just be sure to cancel it before the end of the trial period.
The first step is to punch our domain into Ahrefs in order to identify the content that’s already ranking well in Google, just not in the top spot.
We can make our job easier by filtering for keywords in the 10 – 30 position and then sort by keyword volume:
We can now see plenty of keywords that are on the verge of reaching page 1 and generating a ton of traffic, but for whatever reason, Google has decided the content is not relevant enough to rank on page 1.
As you can see in the screenshot above, we’ve set the filters to show the keywords that are in position 10 – 30 and we’ve sorted it by volume. As these keywords are already ranking highly, it’ll only take a small push for them to start bringing in traffic.
For a lot of these keywords, they aren’t ranking on page 1 because they are not directly relevant to the search query or the article’s content. We can fix this!
In many cases, this is because the content that is ranking for these keywords is not truly all that relevant to the searcher’s query; however, we can fix that!
We’ll need to look through these keywords and compare them to the article title in order to find something to target. We’re looking for something that’s ranking, but isn’t necessarily included in the content of the article.
In the example below, we can see that this article has several keywords that are on the cusp of ranking in the top 10 and aren’t included in the content of the article. For example, “Cissp Study Guide” and “How to Study for the CISSP”.
Both of these keywords have decent search volume, 400 a month. The article is targeting prank website products for trolling your friends, but there’s no reason we can’t supplement our article to make it more relevant to “Cissp Study Guide” and “How to Study for the CISSP”.
Improving The Article Relevance To Rank Higher
It’s easy to understand why this content isn’t ranking in the top 10 for these queries. Nowhere in the content can we see these keywords mentioned or discussed.
Before we add some content related to these keywords, we may be able to find some other low hanging fruit to target that is related to both “Cissp Study Guide” and “How to Study for the CISSP”.
We can do this in Ahrefs by clicking on both “Cissp Study Guide” and “How to Study for the CISSP”. This will take us to another page that shows related keywords that we may wish to include in whatever content we add to the article.
As you can see in the screenshot above, there are a ton of keyword related to “Cissp Study Guide” which we can incorporate into our content to rank for even more.
Write Additional Content To Rank Higher
We now have some solid data we can use to improve our content. We know what keywords are nearly ranking and we know what related keywords we can include supercharging our piece of content.
We can now begin the writing process.
I would suggest adding two new sections, one for each keyword. The content we add doesn’t need to belong, perhaps 100 – 200 words for each keyword.
Once the content has been written and added to the post we just go to Google search console and get Google to recrawl the website and index the post again.
Within a couple of weeks or even days, we can expect these keywords to move up the Serps and into a position that generates traffic.
Rinse and Repeat
All in all, we’ve probably spent an hour researching and writing content in order to increase our keyword rankings for a single article and to increase our search relevance.
Our content is now longer, it will rank higher, bring in more traffic, and will be harder for competitors to beat in the search results.
Repeat this process for multiple articles and watch as your page views increase every single month.