Writing SEO-friendly content can be done the easy way or the hard way.
The hard way is, of course, to come up with some “revolutionary new topic” based on things that you think your customers would like.
Unfortunately, the whole “built it, and they will come” approach doesn’t work.
You spend a lot of time, effort, and energy only to end up with very little to show for it.
Thankfully, there is an easy way to do this: the easy way is to let your competitors do your homework for you.
That's right—regardless of how esoteric or obscure your niche is, there is sure to be somebody who has built an established website in that niche.
Find those sites, run them through paid SEO tools, and look for organic keywords that their content is already ranking for.
Filter these keywords in terms of monthly search volume as well as keyword difficulty.
Ideally, you should target keywords that are the easiest to rank but have fairly decent search volume.
Depending on your niche, this can be as little as 100 visits per month or possibly even 500 visitors per month.
Regardless, get all those keywords, plug them into a tool like Postpace, Frase, or Surfer SEO, and you have yourself the framework for SEO-friendly content.
I've done these dozens of times, and here's my pro tip.
If you are targeting lower-difficulty keywords, you will be able to rank much faster using the approach above.
You will be able to bounce out of the Google sandbox sooner rather than later.
On the other hand, if you are targeting moderate to even difficult keywords, you can use the technique above, but you have to follow it up with high-powered backlinks through guest posts or press releases.
You have to earn higher-quality backlinks because of the competition level of your target keywords.
If you were to ask me, though, I would shoot for keywords that have the lowest keyword difficulty and decent or even low levels of traffic.
The key is to start somewhere, especially if you are in a fairly competitive niche.
