Determining a "home run" keyword

Trying to narrow a list of keywords down to only the ones that are guaranteed to rank with strong content. Using aHrefs.

Criteria I'm using:

0-5 KD
Volume at 100+
Long-tail search term (4+ words)
No featured snippet
No products
No real competition (determine by manually looking at SERPs)

• The top 1-3 results are off-topic or a forum post
• The content for the top 1-3 results is thin (less than 1000 words)
• The content for top 1-3 is not SEO optimized (no images/videos, internal/external links, table of contents, low keyword density)
• The content for top 1-3 has little to no backlinks
• The top 1-3 results are less than 20 DR

Anything you would add or remove to this list?

Here's the 80/20: The top 1-3 is user-generated content (Quora, Reddit etc..), that means (probably) no one have wrote about the subject, so there's a very high chance you'll rank first page, even with low authority site.

This looks like a solid plan. You should also take care of On-page SEO and internal linking for better results.

Starblazer said:

This looks like a solid plan. You should also take care of On-page SEO and internal linking for better results.

Click to expand...

Any good guides on interlinking

Let's say you create an authority website and focus on a few relevant keywords. The website starts to rank and you wonder how you can expand. In today's SEO landscape, we never go vertical... We need to dominate keywords one at a time, and not only that, but, we need to do it through a series of relevant pages!

I love the skyscraper technique for this purpose.

Find a set of keywords that are very similar. Group them together and make these ranking pages. Interlink back to the skyscraper post for ultimate contextual relevancy. The link juice that hits all these pages will flow into the skyscraper, which is targeting a higher competition KW. Since you mastered the relevancy.

If you could do this perfectly... you find the home runs, and you line them up with their related, higher competition keyword. You also make sure that harder keyword is of similar description.

Now, how do you compare those "home runs" at the grand slam stage?

You look beyond whether the top SERPs follow basic SEO practices and compare their domain authority, backlinks, user experience, social influence, and similar variables. Avoid competing with websites that have an obvious hierarchy in their content SEO strategy--for me, this is clear as day & is butters my bread.

Next, to position yourself for such an approach:

Forget: LSI keywords

Think: Relevant KW inclusion in on-page SEO & content creation

As for finding these "home run" opportunities, I think you are mentally prepared. A lack of a featured snippet makes it easy to take that top spot. Top SERPs with unoptimized pages are often easy to beat. eCommerce-based competitors are an obvious exception.

I bet you could figure out a good scraping bot and locate some opportunities by setting the right criteria. Now, actually, I'm a tad bit interested in the concept. Does anyone have an idea of a tool that offers such a power: to search a long list of potential KWs and detect which have top SERPs from a select list of URLs? Or, for now, as a minimum--lower competition keywords that have Reddit as the top SERP.

SEOMADE said:

Let's say you create an authority website and focus on a few relevant keywords. The website starts to rank and you wonder how you can expand. In today's SEO landscape, we never go vertical... We need to dominate keywords one at a time, and not only that, but, we need to do it through a series of relevant pages!

I love the skyscraper technique for this purpose.

Find a set of keywords that are very similar. Group them together and make these ranking pages. Interlink back to the skyscraper post for ultimate contextual relevancy. The link juice that hits all these pages will flow into the skyscraper, which is targeting a higher competition KW. Since you mastered the relevancy.

If you could do this perfectly... you find the home runs, and you line them up with their related, higher competition keyword. You also make sure that harder keyword is of similar description.

Now, how do you compare those "home runs" at the grand slam stage?

You look beyond whether the top SERPs follow basic SEO practices and compare their domain authority, backlinks, user experience, social influence, and similar variables. Avoid competing with websites that have an obvious hierarchy in their content SEO strategy--for me, this is clear as day & is butters my bread.

Next, to position yourself for such an approach:

Forget: LSI keywords

Think: Relevant KW inclusion in on-page SEO & content creation

As for finding these "home run" opportunities, I think you are mentally prepared. A lack of a featured snippet makes it easy to take that top spot. Top SERPs with unoptimized pages are often easy to beat. eCommerce-based competitors are an obvious exception.

I bet you could figure out a good scraping bot and locate some opportunities by setting the right criteria. Now, actually, I'm a tad bit interested in the concept. Does anyone have an idea of a tool that offers such a power: to search a long list of potential KWs and detect which have top SERPs from a select list of URLs? Or, for now, as a minimum--lower competition keywords that have Reddit as the top SERP.

Click to expand...

Wow, thanks for the reply. And yes that would be a great idea for a bot. Something where you could copy and paste a few thousand keywords and it goes through each one and does the manual look through for you

Deadlight said:

Any good guides on interlinking

Click to expand...

Interlinking is a small concept so you won't find much guides. A plugin like LinkWhisper can handle it all. If you highlight anchor text in Wordpress and type a word, you'll find suggestions for internal links. This is helpful to manually build internal links.

Starblazer said:

Interlinking is a small concept so you won't find much guides. A plugin like LinkWhisper can handle it all. If you highlight anchor text in Wordpress and type a word, you'll find suggestions for internal links. This is helpful to manually build internal links.

Click to expand...

Holy shit, that plugin looks amazing. Thank you!

I would also check if the kw are KGR as an extra

I would add allintitle results to the checklist
You can use kw chef to filter queries ranking for more UGC

HustleTong said:

I would add allintitle results to the checklist
You can use kw chef to filter queries ranking for more UGC

Click to expand...

GenesisOne said:

I would also check if the kw are KGR as an extra

Click to expand...

Thanks for reply

@RealDaddy also has some informational threads on using this tool for KW research.

MisterF said:

@RealDaddy also has some informational threads on using this tool for KW research.

Click to expand...

Agree, definitely gonna use that featured snippet hack of his