- Apr 25, 2011
- 19,848
- 28,295
This is a very simple tip for finding easy to rank keywords from your competitors using the popular tool ahrefs.
First of all, load up ahrefs, enter your money site URL and go to site explorer > organic keywords.
Here you will find a list of all the keywords that your site is currently ranking for.
Click on the export button to download a spreadsheet containing this data.
In excel, select all of the coumns and then click on filter in the data tab. This will allow you to organise all of your data by specific column(s).
You can do most of this stuff within ahrefs, but I find that Excel is more popwerful when it comes to filtering.
Order the data by position and then click on the arrow next to the "Volume" column and select number filters, between and enter 100 to 5000.
Thats just an example, but basically what you are doing is filtering all of your organic rankings so that you find the best positions.
Now you have a list of the keywords that are doing best on your site at present.
Take the top couple of keywords from this list and search on Google for those terms.
Look lower down the rankings and find other niche sites - so basically ignore the big names within your niche, ignore amazon and other giants.
Just look for the smaller sites - affiliate sites, hobby sites, blogs and so on.
Gather 5-10 of these domains, by searching up several keywords for which you are currently ranking.
Now you have a list of competitors that you are ranking above for at least some search terms.
That means your domain is quite probably stronger than theirs, of you have done more work than them, or they dont have the same SEO skills that you have.
Now, return to ahrefs and plug those domains into the organic keyword tool within site explorer, the same as you did for your own domain above.
Export all of this data to Excel in the same way as above.
Open the data up in Excel and set up data filtering the same as you done previously.
If you find the site is in a slightly different niche and not all of the keywords are relevant, then you can filter the list by clicking on the arrow next to the keyword column.
Then go to text filters, contains and enter a keyword relevant to your niche. That way you can filter the keyword data by niche.
Now, order the data by position - low to high - and this way you can find all of the keywords that your competitor is ranking for.
Filter the Volume column so that you display only keywords that have a reasonable search volume.
Now you have a list of decent keywords for which you can probably rank higher than your competitor.
All you have to do now is produce some content targeting each keyword and boom, you have some easy rankings.
I recently implimented this on one of my sites and found a keyword with 800 monthly search volume, the competitor was only ranking at 34 for this keyword.
Their page wasn't really relevant to the keyword either.
I produced an article specifically targeting the keyword and a few weeks later, after checking the serps, my article is rnaking #1 for the keyword.
Without any offpage SEO done what so ever. Just simply producing a reasonably well optimized peice of content.
First of all, load up ahrefs, enter your money site URL and go to site explorer > organic keywords.
Here you will find a list of all the keywords that your site is currently ranking for.
Click on the export button to download a spreadsheet containing this data.
In excel, select all of the coumns and then click on filter in the data tab. This will allow you to organise all of your data by specific column(s).
You can do most of this stuff within ahrefs, but I find that Excel is more popwerful when it comes to filtering.
Order the data by position and then click on the arrow next to the "Volume" column and select number filters, between and enter 100 to 5000.
Thats just an example, but basically what you are doing is filtering all of your organic rankings so that you find the best positions.
Now you have a list of the keywords that are doing best on your site at present.
Take the top couple of keywords from this list and search on Google for those terms.
Look lower down the rankings and find other niche sites - so basically ignore the big names within your niche, ignore amazon and other giants.
Just look for the smaller sites - affiliate sites, hobby sites, blogs and so on.
Gather 5-10 of these domains, by searching up several keywords for which you are currently ranking.
Now you have a list of competitors that you are ranking above for at least some search terms.
That means your domain is quite probably stronger than theirs, of you have done more work than them, or they dont have the same SEO skills that you have.
Now, return to ahrefs and plug those domains into the organic keyword tool within site explorer, the same as you did for your own domain above.
Export all of this data to Excel in the same way as above.
Open the data up in Excel and set up data filtering the same as you done previously.
If you find the site is in a slightly different niche and not all of the keywords are relevant, then you can filter the list by clicking on the arrow next to the keyword column.
Then go to text filters, contains and enter a keyword relevant to your niche. That way you can filter the keyword data by niche.
Now, order the data by position - low to high - and this way you can find all of the keywords that your competitor is ranking for.
Filter the Volume column so that you display only keywords that have a reasonable search volume.
Now you have a list of decent keywords for which you can probably rank higher than your competitor.
All you have to do now is produce some content targeting each keyword and boom, you have some easy rankings.
I recently implimented this on one of my sites and found a keyword with 800 monthly search volume, the competitor was only ranking at 34 for this keyword.
Their page wasn't really relevant to the keyword either.
I produced an article specifically targeting the keyword and a few weeks later, after checking the serps, my article is rnaking #1 for the keyword.
Without any offpage SEO done what so ever. Just simply producing a reasonably well optimized peice of content.
