Venchito Tampon Jr

7 Compelling Reasons Why You Need to Invest in Backlinks

One of the most common questions we get from new SEOs or business owners is why they should do link building for their websites. 

It is a valid question for marketers as they want to learn more about the importance of backlinks before putting their money into this search engine optimization activity. 

Without understanding its value, they won’t invest in this highly important area of SEO, let alone take the first step.

Now, let me go straight to the 7 reasons you should invest in backlinks. Then, we give you actionable tips on achieving it with your link building campaigns.

Why You Need to Invest in Backlinks?

1. Branding

When you build links, you associate your brand with other brands and entities in your space. The exact anchor text, placement of the link, and the type of website where you have gotten the link tell so much about how you take care of your brand.

We’ve had the privilege of working with enterprise clients for the past couple of years. And it is critically important before we actually engage in any link building strategies for them to know that any plan would 

For example, we are working with an enterprise SaaS, and given their prestigious reputation, we could quickly get links across different industries by simply suggesting their resource or free product.

That kind of branding has amounted to several online and offline recognitions and has proven to be effective in bringing the company (not just the website) to the next level.

As a branding tool, link building helps new websites engage in SEO to increase their brand awareness further and, ultimately, get a more significant market share in their industry through SEO means.

“Link building as a branding” mindset will impact how you plan, strategize, and execute your link building strategies. 

You won’t engage with publishers and bloggers that are too far-stretch regarding relevance to your brand. This forces you to qualify domains/sites in the link prospecting stage before emailing them for link requests.

When you properly place links on sites/entities you want to better associate your brand with, you’ll have higher chances of bringing in new branded searches for your company, personality, or product. 

When readers see your backlinks featured on reputable A-list digital publishers, it would spark interest in them and try searching for your brand on search engines. 

Link building is significant in developing your holistic branding campaigns, not just in organic marketing. 

One of the ways backlinks affect branding is you can populate your brand name’s SERP real estate with your owned media or web properties. This would help you establish a robust online reputation. 

Actionable Tips To Enhance Branding with Backlinks:

Focus on the reasons why people link. 

Two primary reasons people link to your brand are relationships and content. 

The content you publish and distribute (i.e., product, service, offering, information) and the relationships you establish with link sources (e.g., strategic link partners, industry friends, or brands you actually partner with or use).

When strategizing for a link building campaign, answer these questions:

• What content assets are going to attract linkable audiences? 
• Can we leverage existing relationships for content distribution (for links)? 

Treat your content as a product. 

Most marketers view content creation as another marketing activity they have to do consistently. But when you treat your content as a product, you release with the highest quality possible.

At SharpRocket, we share case studies and actionable link building strategies that are proven to work for our clients and we think might be useful to our readers. We differentiate our content assets from other agencies' blogs by diving into the real practical side of link building and SEO - to share the most actionable advice in every blog post.

2. Crawl Budget 

Crawl budget refers to the quantity of pages crawled on a website within a specific timeframe. When your site has a larger crawl budget, more pages are indexed and reassessed, improving search engine rankings.

Simply look at Google Search Console to get an idea of what your crawl budget is. 

According to many SEOs, there are key factors to optimize the crawl budget: 1) popularity and 2) freshness. 

Popular domains get crawled more often (popularity). Websites with more updated and new content will likely be crawled (freshness). 

Three link building activities can help make websites more popular and fresh: proper internal linking, inbound link acquisition, content audit, and upgrade.

You help optimize your site’s crawl budget by actively pursuing inbound backlinks. SEO Spyglass did an SEO test in which they found a strong correlation between having more inbound links and more spider visits to a page.

3. Traffic

“The links that people want to follow carry the most weight”. - Bill Slawski. 

The types of links that matter in today’s SEO are the ones that send relevant traffic to your site. These are most potent in that they capture the very purpose of having a link to drive users to the destination page (serves as an additional reference or offering). 

Link building allows the site to capture a constant traffic flow from relevant sources. And this traffic can bring additional sales (conversions) to the business site. 

Actionable Tips To Gain Traffic with Backlinks:

Distribute content on relevant websites. 

Not all potential link sources should be highly relevant to your site. But at the foundational level, you should aim for an initial set of backlinks within the same industry. 

I’ve covered this degree of relevance (Searchworks’ framework) in my other link building guide on strongest backlinks to help you marketers expand their link prospecting lists by tapping into different levels of target link sources. 

Think highly of strategic backlink placement. 

You can’t expect traffic to be sent to your site by placing inbound links on any place on the referring page. 

The more visible your links where users click on them, the more likely you’ll get referral traffic from linking pages. 

The best way is to pursue contextual links (backlinks placed within the body of the content) to ensure clicks on links.

4. Trust and Authority 

Trust and authority are intangible SEO factors most marketers ignore when investing in a link building campaign.

The most beneficial part when you’re actively pursuing the right types of backlinks for your site is that audiences who don’t know you before start familiarizing themselves with your work and the content you produce.

When there is trust, the momentum starts growing in building the authority and thought leadership you need to attract new link opportunities and relationships for your business. 

Actionable Tips To Build Trust and Authority with Backlinks:

Acquire links from highly credible sites. 

Get backlinks from sites that both people and Google trust and see as an authority in your space. The way to know it is to see which publications/sites have a massive following of readers and are constantly producing valuable information in your space.

For example, Daily Coffee News and Fresh Cup are highly credible publications in the coffee industry that constantly attract passive links from other content creators. 

These sites get more popular as they publish highly valued content their target audiences (coffee owners, roasters, baristas, coffee lovers, etc..) would be willing to consume, share, and distribute to their peers. 

This blog also gets featured in top listicles because of the credibility and proof of work we did over the past decade.

So, getting referential links from these trusted and authoritative sites can boost any brand’s presence in the industry.  

Utilize Digital PR. 

Digital PR is now mainstream, but I’ve seen brands still skeptical about its effectiveness in establishing the brand's authority.

If you want to expand your territories in other regions/countries, you will likely benefit from Digital PR campaigns.

In my previous article on SEO in 2024 insights, I covered one client of ours who is heavily invested now in digital PR to push through their brand awareness in the Southeast Asian region (starting first here in the Philippines).

By getting backlinks from reputable sites, readers of those publications start becoming curious about the brand, what it is about, and how it can add value to their lives. 

5. Conversions

Link building helps drive assisted conversions to your site. 

When you target link sources that can drive more customers (highly engaged traffic) to your site, you’re likely to see conversions for your business.

Actionable Tips To Get Conversions with Backlinks:

Aim for referring pages with middle-of-the-funnel intent. 

These include lists of products/services in your sector or region. Getting links from these pages attracts potential buyers to your site who are into their decision-making purchase in finding solutions to their needs.

Leverage relationships to get links from credible sites’ top-ranking pages. 

Some highly credible publications have strict editorial guidelines for publishing content from external authors. This would require you to build internal relationships with in-house editors and staff to land a chance to be a guest author. 

That said, if you have some relationships with link partners that you can use to land authorship opportunities for industry publications, you can get backlinks from these distributed content.

These relationship-driven links are difficult for your competitors to acquire, which increases the link gap against other ranking competing sites. 

6. Rankings

We’ve covered enough reasons to invest in backlinks for your site. 

If you have the right mindset of building links, this obvious imperative to ranking your site is highly possible. 

Google is largely a link-based algorithm that will stay the same for years. But not all links are equal. You should acquire backlinks that matter most. 

Actionable Tips To Improve Rankings with Backlinks:

Build foundational links at the start. 

Google rewards websites that continue to send trust signals (off-page). 

Start by getting backlinks from social profiles, citations, and local niche-specific directories. Do it like what a regular business does. A legitimate company would have complete social profiles (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). 

Passively attract natural links via ranking for informational keywords. 

Publish assets with the intent to rank for informational and question keywords. When other content publishers find your content helpful to use as references (while researching their topics), they’ll be more likely to link to it from their content. 

7. Innovation For Next Brand Offerings

This one is related to earlier branding reasons. Another core benefit of link acquisition is it allows brands (especially starting ones) to innovate their product or service offerings based on the current demands.

For example, we’ve been revamping our SEO strategies for my coffee brands. We are constantly thinking of new business models we can touch on to expand our offerings. 

Through ranking for the best coffee service keywords here in the Philippines and other link building partnerships, we’ve added a new coffee cart package.

It stems from the idea that other suppliers, like local wedding event companies in the Philippines, are linking to our coffee blog. 

Build links to see consumer behavior patterns and where their attention is going. This would give you insights into new product or service offerings you can offer with your brand. 

That’s all for now. If you have questions, feel free to comment below. And you can also follow me on Twitter @venchito14.

---

by Venchito Tampon Jr

SEO For Immigration Lawyers

People search on Google when looking for immigration lawyers. 

So, if you want to increase quality leads to your legal practice through SEO, here’s a step-by-step guide.

SEO For Immigration Lawyers

SEO for immigration lawyers depends on your target audience. 

If you’re targeting local clients, you only need local SEO. You must optimize your site for national keywords (e.g., US audience) if it's a national audience. 

Unlike plain SEO, local SEO isn’t limited to improving rankings in the regular Google's SERPs. It also focused on getting your business to climb the top of local business map packs displayed on top of search results pages. 

You can rank for both Google Business Map packs and organic search listings if you want greater visibility. 

Imagine having your website appear on Google Map Packs while they could still see your brand in organic search engine listings as they scroll the page. 

Now, let’s get into how to rank your immigration law firm for Google Map packs and organic search listings. 

How to Rank Your Immigration Law Firm? 

1. NAP Consistency   

NAP represents business name, address, and phone number (NAP), the three most essential elements of a local SEO campaign. 

By consistently placing it across prominent places on your site and other sites for citations, you help Google identify your brand and associate it with its geographic location. 

Include NAP in your About Us page or sitewise in your website’s footer or header sections.  

2. Claim Your Google Business Profile 

Google Business Profile is a free Google service that allows you to create a business listing online. 

When search users look for your business, your Google Business Profile will display its map location, image, and other general business information.

Create your Google Business Profile here. Fill out the fields in your account, even the ones with optional fields. This would allow you to get ahead and outrank your competitors. 

Write a detailed business description. 

Add original photos of your office, staff, and any relevant business pictures. 

Ensure you accurately input the correct category. Google has now added specific categories in Google Business Profile. 

Link to your social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter (X), Linkedin, and TikTok. It’s a feature of Google Business Profile where you can add more trust signals to your business/site. 

And lastly, get genuine reviews. You can ask your clients to leave reviews on your Google Business Profile. This would help your GBP to rank higher on Google Map Packs and increase conversions from potential clients checking social proof of your site. 

3. Be Strategic in Your Keyword Research 

Ranking for immigration lawyer keyword isn’t an easy feat.

Take a look at how competitive local SEO is in the legal space. 

However, you still have a fighting chance if you take a different approach to keyword research given that keyword difficulty shouldn’t be your sole indicator for search competition. 

By looking at Google’s SERPs for your target keyword, you’ll then see who are the top-ranking pages and what are their current domain authority. 

For instance, if you do a Google search for “immigration lawyer in St. Louis”, you’ll that some of the ranking websites have Ahrefs’ Domain Rating of less than 30. 

It shows you have a high chance to rank for this keyphrase even if you have a new website.  

Target Long-Tail Immigration Lawyer Keywords 

If you have a specialized service, i.e., immigration legal service for Filipinos, you may target a more specific keyphrase, “Filipino immigration lawyer Chicago”. 

This type of keyword typically has a low search volume but a high intent of converting into clients and has lower competition. 

Aside from creating landing pages that target your head terms, “immigration lawyer in Chicago”, you can publish more landing pages that optimize for “Filipino immigration lawyer Chicago”.

Publish Informational Content Around Your Target Keywords 

One of the best ways to rank for keywords is to build topical authority. Topical authority refers to gaining a level of authority within a specific expertise or area in the industry that Google recognizes you as an expert/authority in that niche. 

Start creating blog content for people asking questions related to your legal service. 

Enter the keyword in Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer. Go to Questions. 

Though most of these keywords have low search volume, the traffic you’ll get from ranking for these long-tail keywords will pile up and help build your site’s topical authority. 

Steal Traffic From Other Immigration Lawyers Websites

Reverse engineering your competitors’ sites would reveal keyword insights you can also rank for (and hopefully steal the traffic from by outranking their sites).

Enter Competitors’ Domain in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer - Organic Keywords. Then, filter results by “Top 10” and Keyword Difficulty of 15.

Here are interesting findings from this keyword research exercise: 

• More specific keywords to target additional landing pages (deportation defense lawyer, green card lawyer NYC, fiancée visa lawyer New York, removal defense attorney)
• Informational keywords to attract more traffic (e.g., “k1 visa did not marry”).
• “immigration lawyer reviews” - you can optimize your client reviews page for this keyword.

I’m only scratching the surface. There are a couple of more keywords you can find from doing competitor keyword research. 

4. Localize On-page SEO Elements

On-page SEO for local legal services needs to reflect the target geography in the following fields:

• Title tags - indicate what your immigration law firm is serving.
• Meta descriptions - help increase CTR, so better mention your target location.
• H1 text - the main headline text of the page must be marked by the H1 HTML tag.
• Body text - mention the country, city, or area you’re targeting in the body of your content as you naturally write the content. 
• Entitles and LSI - include variations of keywords and entities (businesses or personality names) when appropriate in your content copy. 

5. Localize Content

A big chunk of local SEO is crafting localized content targeted to an audience within a geographic setting.

Write content that is applicable and specific to your target area. For instance, if you’re writing content to possible clients' questions, such as, “How Long Does It Take to Get a Green Card Through Marriage?”, mention entities specific to your target location.

You may include the policies, laws, and culture of that city. This way, you send rich signals to Google that you are relevant to that location. 

6. Build Foundational Links

One big mistake most SEOs make is acquiring inbound links without building the right off-page trust signals to their websites.

Before doing guest blogging, resource page link building, or digital PR, begin with the basics.

Social Profiles

Place your links on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social sites to initiate link building campaign. 

Optimize profiles by filling out all information, uploading images, and posting content on these social platforms. 

This is what a real company does with their social accounts, so gaining trust signals by building your social profiles. 

Get Listed on Legal Directories

Legal directories tend to rank for your target head terms like “immigration lawyer in New York”, as these pages satisfy the search intent of providing more options for legal services to search users.

With the recent Google algorithm updates, you’ll notice two or more pages ranking from the same domain. For this Google’s SERPs for “immigration lawyer in New York Google Search”, you see two pages from Justia ranking for the key phrase. 

Though these SERP patterns may change, being listed on legal directories is a colossal advantage that helps improve your brand's visibility for people directly visiting these directory sites.

While these directory links help improve the ranking power of your website. 

Resource Lists

If you are part of any advocacy groups or non-profit organizations, they may have specific resource lists where your immigration lawyer site can be listed.

Reach out to them and get direct link placements from their dedicated pages for attorneys. 

Advanced SEO For Immigration Lawyers

If you have covered the SEO basics, there may be a few optimizations you can make to your legal site to dominate rankings for your target local keyword. Here are some of the legal SEO strategies you can test. 

Steal Link Building Ideas From Immigration Lawyers in Bigger Cities

You may have noticed I’m using immigration lawyers from New York as my examples. The reason is that most optimizations, including link acquisition, are heavily invested in these bigger cities. 

Steal the best ideas for link building from immigration lawyers in bigger cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. 

You’ll find creative link building ideas that aren’t only applicable to their dedicated cities but for your geographic area, as well.

Replicate their link building strategies to acquire local links for your legal site. 

Execute Digital PR Campaign

Legal isn’t a sexy niche. However, there are ways to utilize legal brand stories that would allow you to attract contextual links from local newspapers and authoritative publications naturally.

Take a look at this link from the New York Times, which one immigration lawyer was able to acquire. 

The expertise of the lawyer on the topic becomes the reason for journalists to cite him in their content. 

Digital PR isn’t scalable, particularly for legal space. However, if you can partner with legal experts if you’re doing SEO for legal clients, acquiring links your local competitors in your space can’t build would be a creative strategy. 

Conclusion

SEO for immigration lawyers helps improve your branding visibility and increase quality leads looking for legal services. Contact us today if you need help with link building or full SEO campaigns for law firms. 

---

by Venchito Tampon Jr

SEO For Lead Generation: How to Drive $5,000 Leads To Your Website

Generating leads for a service/product is one of the lucrative business models in today’s digital marketing. 

Being #2 of the top challenges for founders in 2023, marketing that drives ROI for the business in traffic, leads, and sales is one solvable by the best driver of qualified traffic - search engine optimization (SEO). 

By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to apply SEO for lead generation in your business, with practical examples to show you how it works.

8 SEO For Lead Generation Techniques

1. Think like a customer. 

Effective marketing is understanding customers' pain points, challenges, and problems so you can craft a compelling message they’ll best resonate with.

The same is true with SEO. 

Think like your customer before thinking about how to attack technical SEO, on-page SEO, and link building. 

The key is to dive deep into how your customers think when doing search queries on Google. Through then, you’ll be better at crafting a business-centric content strategy instead of relying purely on SEO keywords irrelevant to your business. 

For instance, one of my businesses is corporate training and speaking services. 

By focusing on business-centric content strategy, I can drive 30-50 qualified leads to my training business, worth $500 for each qualified lead, as I’m getting paid to speak at $500 per hour.

If I’m only thinking about SEO keywords, I could have published pages for “speaking services Philippines”, do basic on-page SEO, and hope it gets qualified leads for my business. 

Instead, I asked them how they would find out about their service provider during my sales calls and personal interactions. What I noticed is that they don’t start with generic search queries such as “public speaking services Philippines”, but instead go very specific with “leadership speaker Philippines” or “growth mindset speaker Philipines”. 

I created dedicated landing pages for each of these niche terms, some of which have zero to low search volume. 

Low search volume keywords can drive qualified leads (in aggregate), given that they’re highly targeted for search users with transactional intent. Even more important is that it builds topical authority for your website, as it covers a wide range of topics your competitors’ sites don’t intend to publish on their blogs. 

Talk to your sales team. Ask about your client. Be thorough in getting your customer's needs; you will unveil enough insights to start your keyword research.

The best keyword research methodology starts from how customers type their search queries, not from proprietary SEO tools.

If you understand how your customers think and behave, you’ll be surprised at how many keyword insights you can generate.

 

2. Calculate Lead Value  

Understanding how SEO can make you more money before executing all SEO recommendations to optimize your site and rank it for your commercial keywords.

This involves calculating how much one qualified lead is worth for me. 

For instance, our coffee eCommerce site operates like a B2B sales process. Instead of a typical buying process where customers pick their product, add it to a cart, check out, and deliver the physical product to them.

We’ve found that 100% of our customers initially ask for a “quotation” or “proposal” that fits their coffee machine requirements. 

Given that each coffee machine costs between $500 to $7,500, most food & beverage personnel or cafe owners must first consider the specs and technical know-how of each purchase. 

Our buying cycle takes a little longer than a typical eCommerce website.

This means that the value of lead on our end is much higher, ranging from $1500 to $2500. Assuming we can close 20-30% of all leads. 

To calculate Lead Value, you can use the following formula:

Lead Value (LTV) = Average Sale Value × Average Number of Repeat Transactions

× Average Retention Time (in months or years)

Where:

• Average Sale Value is the average amount of money a customer spends during a single transaction.
• Average Number of Repeat Transactions is the average number of times a customer purchases within a given period (e.g., a month or a year).
• Average Retention Time is the average length of time a customer continues to buy from your business.

By calculating lead value, you can prove the marketing investment for SEO services and its direct impact on leads and sales. 

 

3. Drive conversions from TOFU content

Top-of-the-funnel content is mainly created to rank for informational keywords and drive organic traffic from people searching for answers to industry questions.

Examples of these search queries are: 

• why coffee machines are expensive?
• how do coffee machines work? 
• how long do coffee machines last? 

This content isn’t intended to sell the audience on a product or service but to educate, help, and answer common questions or pain points.

There is a way to drive direct conversions from TOFU content.

We did this to one of my businesses - a coffee shop franchise, where we drive significant leads every month.

Here are some quick steps we made.

Sticky Widgets

You can include a sticky widget in your blog post section where it is mainly visible to readers. 

 

It is a secondary objective to drive conversions. You still want web users to be satisfied with your informational content (it’s the very reason you created it in the first place).

But just as they begin to consume the value, you build initial trust. And this trust can later translate into sales.

Strategic Internal Link Placements

Most SEOs do internal linking to drive link equity to their other important pages. While that’s the main objective of internal linking, it can also help with helping users navigate to different places on your website.

For example, in one of the sections of my leading guide on starting a coffee shop business, I added an internal link to my coffee shop franchise.

Not only does it pass link equity to my franchise page, but it becomes more visible for my potential clients to see it directly on their informational page.

Highly Visible Contact Information 

For industries with a high customer touch, the easier it is for your readers to contact you, the more likely you’ll increase your leads.

What I did to make contact information sticky at the top bar. Web visitors can contact us via phone or email without visiting our contact page.

 

4. Steal traffic from competitors’ branded keywords. 

If a website is new, it doesn’t have much authority to compete against its competitors. Therefore, you don’t see significant traffic in the first few weeks after launch (case: sandbox).

But as you create a consensus of authenticity from trusted sources like citations, socials, and profiles, you allow Google to favor traffic on your site. 

One of the best ways to get early traffic for your new website and generate qualified leads is to bank on your competitors’ keywords.

Topical competitors are currently ranking for niche keywords (even their own branded terms) that you can use to steal traffic for your site.b

For instance, I’ve created 20+ dedicated landing pages targeting all competitors’ keywords for my coffee franchise. 

These pages offer an alternative option to our Hills & Valleys Cafe Franchise.

We give enough information about our competitors’ franchises, from a quick cafe overview to specific investment and franchise details. 

Then, at the bottom of the page, we added a section to promote a franchise alternative (our Hills & Valleys Cafe).

By doing so, we attract and rank for most of our competitors’ keywords. 

We even ranked #1, given that some competitors don’t have their websites yet.

 

How do you capitalize on competitors’ keywords?

Use Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer to find branded keywords of your competitors. If you can find “vs.” or “alternative” on the key phrase, it’s highly targeted for those searchers looking exactly for alternatives. 

Publish “alternative” pages to competitors’ products/services. See which competitors are highly relevant to your primary offering. In our case, we only get cafes that also offer franchise opportunities.

Satisfy the search intent by providing enough information for the readers. The company of the competitors, all pertinent details they need. 

You can create a comparison chart or table to show feature differences for web-based products. 

Build internal links to it from other relevant blog posts/pages. This will help increase its rankings and reach page 1 on Google within a few days.

By ranking for competitors’ branded keywords, you can steal traffic from them and generate leads for your business. 

 

5. Build authors’ expertise on external publications. 

Aside from establishing your on-page signals for your site, it’s an excellent way to create trust signals off-page on external web properties.

Its impact on generating leads can be directly attributed to other publications driving traffic to your website (“referral traffic”).

In the age of guest blogging, it’s crucial to stand out among the crowd of content by establishing your expertise in the subject area.

Here are some ways to build authors’ expertise off-page:

• Choose topics that aren’t too general and may only require technical expertise to finish the content (e.g., how to fix the Breville espresso machine). 
• Write more detailed author bios with strong attributions to your credentials and portfolio as a niche expert. 
• Build internal links to your guest posts from your other relevant guest posts (this also helps increase the visibility of your main guest post).
• Invest in hiring experts who are also writers in your space. This speaks of the quality of content they can produce. 

By building external trust signals on your site, you establish the right EEAT signals to develop the entire topical authority of your brand. Which eventually can help you rank for commercial keywords that drive direct sales and leads for your business.

 

6. Don’t ignore local SEO. 

Local SEO is mainly focused on helping the business climb the top of local business map packs displayed atop search engine results pages. 

Compared to ranking for national keywords where competition is off the roof, you have a high chances of ranking for local keywords with enough optimization on your GMB on your website. 

Claim your Google Business Profile. 

The free Google service lets you create a business listing online. It is then verified by Google, allowing you to display your listing on Google Maps. 

When your business name is searched, you’ll find Google displaying your map location, with an image and all the general business information you entered. 

Follow the procedure here and claim your Google Business Profile. 

Recommended Reading: 27 Link Building Strategies For Local SEO

Even if you’re a B2B, you’re likely to succeed in local SEO and gain constant leads by ranking for local map packs and organic search results for local keywords.

For instance, we’ve ranked highly for our target keyword, “coffee shop in San Jose del Monte Bulacan”. This is our first cafe branch in one of the developed cities in the Philippines.

By targeting this exact keyword on our homepage, we let Google see its importance for us to get rankings for this particular keyword.

Pro tip: Find more latent semantic keywords you can rank with new pages. In our example, we also rank as an “Instagrammable cafe in Bulacan” with a dedicated page.

 

7. Publish assets that aren’t treadmill traffic. 

I got this from Brian’s Dean video on SEO tips 2023, which detailed some advanced techniques to get sustainable traffic from Google.

By publishing assets that aren’t treadmill traffic, you don’t rely on a surge of traffic for days. But you’re targeting a sustainable, constant flow of organic traffic (and natural links).

Some of these assets that can drive sustainable traffic:

• YouTube videos that rank for “how-to” or any informational industry keywords.
• Industry guides that tend to rank for highly searched head terms. Static pages that either define a term or satisfy “when”, “why,” and “how” questions.

In generating leads for your business, this speaks wonders as you can invest the resources initially but experience long-term traffic after you publish them. 

Of course, all this requires initial effort, such as building initial links to industry guides so they can rank highly for their target terms. But as they rank, they receive passive natural links from other content creators in the space, reaching an even higher spot on Google’s SERPs.

 

8. Monitor Your Branded Keywords 

As you rank for different industry keywords, you build curiosity in the minds of your search users. 

Most of them would do Google searches for your “brand”, knowing more about what you do and your offers.

All these branded keywords are by-products of different marketing methodologies, paid ads, and organic rankings as you become the top of the mind for topically relevant how-to information.

It is best to monitor for branded keywords and see what questions people ask about your brand.

If there are questions and related queries, you haven’t answered yet or don’t have a dedicated page for them. You can create one to satisfy all these search intent. 

Doing so allows you to funnel all keywords (branded and niche) so they can come deeper into your sales cycle and convert them into customers. 

You’ll be amazed by the results when you put these SEO tips for lead generation into practice. Check out some of our work for proof. 

We’ve covered a high-level look at what goes into an effective content-based link building strategy.

If you’d like to learn more, you can get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help scale your business. 

---

by Venchito Tampon Jr

How To Find Niche Keywords For SEO

Keyword research is an integral part of SEO, as it dictates what type of content you’ll create and publish to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Finding niche keywords is easy, but choosing the right ones to target for your website requires critical thinking.

In this post, we’ll cover how to find and choose the right niche keywords for SEO.

What are niche keywords?

Niche keywords are specific words that interest a small part of a market. Users search these terms to find solutions to problems or more information about the topic they’re looking for.

 

How to Find Niche Keywords for SEO?

The most popular approach to finding niche keywords is inputting seed terms into keyword explorer tools like Ahrefs.

1. Using Tools and Platforms

Let’s start with the basic ones. With these keyword research tools, you can instantly generate hundreds of niche keywords.

Ahrefs

By searching for head terms on Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer, you’ll get a list of all matched words or phrases related to your inputted terms.

For instance, if you’re selling “coffee grinders’, you input the phrase “coffee grinder”, and you’ll see a bunch of niche keywords related to it. You can export and qualify a list based on specific criteria - which I’ll discuss later in this post.

SEMRush

SEMRush has more dynamic features and a massive dataset for keywords that can help you collect more relevant terms suited for your niche.

With its new topic cluster feature, you can easily create a topic cluster that can fit into the minds.

Further Resource:

• SEMRush Review by GotchSEO
• Ahrefs vs Semrush: Which SEO Tool Should You Use in 2023?

 

Answer the Public

AnswerthePublic.com is a free browser-based topic generator tool that allows users to generate niche content ideas based on frequent search questions/queries by web searchers.

The tool displays data visualizations of interconnected topics or questions from primary keywords and topics you’ve inputted on their site.

Pro tip: Export the list of questions and paste them into Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer to see which ones have substantial search volume you can target for your niche content.

 

Quora

Quora is the web’s most popular community-based Q&A platform today.

 

You can generate niche content ideas by skimming through all the questions related to your website/industry. Do a quick search on Quora. Check those with high activity engagement, as these questions are more likely to be searched.

Pro tip: Plug in Quora[com] to Ahrefs and input your topic to see what keywords Quora currently ranks for. It’s a pretty good sign that your content has the potential to rank for these keywords if Quora is part of the top 5/10 spots.

Google Autocomplete

Google has been so effective in suggesting search queries that are based on users’ historical search activity/habit. By doing a Google search for your target topic and not hitting the enter button yet, you’ll find Google Suggest or Autocomplete feature to give you some recommended searches.

I’ve been testing and targeting these Google auto-suggested keywords for one of my niche test sites. And though they have low search volume, most don’t have search volume data for now. These niche keywords are valuable enough to optimize your new content, given they’re near commercial intent.

 

2. Using Reverse Keyword Research

Inputting seed keywords into SEO tools like Ahrefs to scrape a list of all matching and topically-relate keywords and select the ones with high search volume is doing keyword research the conventional way.

However, checking the keywords’ search volume isn’t the only way to find niche keywords.

Doing it reversely without checking if a keyword has a significant search volume will be a better approach.

Reverse keyword research is the process of checking your site’s ability to rank based on the experience and expertise of the author before assessing if the topic has a significant search volume (or is pretty decent to rank with your website).

By first checking your authors’ expertise, you can gain much more advantage in assessing the content's E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

For instance, I’m starting to frequently publish new industry guides on this link building blog with new SEO experiments I’ve been learning from my niche sites that I find helpful to you (as my reader).

From there, I would ask keyword research tools like Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer to give me matching or related keywords based on the inputted topic.

Instead of assessing if I have enough experience or expertise to write about the subject, given it has a good search volume I don’t want to miss with my new content, I’d have much better confidence in crafting the content in a way that’s rankable given its quality and comprehensiveness.

More reasons why reverse keyword research is robust in ranking niche keywords for SEO:

• Expertise and experience are brought to life in a content asset (E-E-A-T signals matter). You are more likely to cover many topics your competitors haven’t written - an excellent way to differentiate yourself from them uniquely.
• You establish topical authority when you’ve published content assets from topics you know are essential in your industry, even if these topics have zero to low search volume.

The best way to start reverse keyword research is to list all topics you know about your industry. Then rate them based on how well you know the topic (“1” being the lowest, “10” being the highest).

Rank these keywords from the topics you’re very knowledgeable about and publish content about them.

Then go to Ahrefs to see if they have an existing search volume. You can restructure words to find if there are existing data the tool has for the keyword.

 

3. Emerging Topics

Emerging topics are industry trending terms with increasing search demand.

And having content to write about gives you an initial advantage to being one of the first few indexed pages solely written about the topic.

It’s also an excellent way to build topical authority, given you demonstrate proficiency across all facets of your niche, including the ones that haven’t seen much light.

Increasing the topical authority of your website as the go-to source of information for niche topics increase the keyword visibility of your blog content for informational search queries.

There are many impressive tools to generate emerging topics in your space quickly. Exploding Topics by Brian Dean gives you regular email updates for any trending topics. This allows you to jump in on the topic and write about it, even before it hits its peak rate.

 

One of the latest videos of Authority Hacker is sharing a strategy on how they’ve tapped into the emerging topics on Tiktok to create content for one of their niche sites in the home DIY space.

As it turned out, Ahrefs have captured more search volume (for its data) and is now revealing a good search volume for the topic.

This is a great way to take advantage of new emerging topics with high potential to get search demand.

4. New Keyword Opportunities

One of the best places to start finding niche keywords is from existing ranking pages.

Your content ranks not only for its main keyword but for other industry-related terms that are potential keyword opportunities.

Google may see your page as relevant enough to rank for page 2, as it gets some impressions and few clicks, but with a thorough investigation, you’ll find it is best to create new content to target those topics.

How to find these new keyword opportunities?

Using Google Search Console

Go to Google Search Console.

Performance - Search Results - Queries/Pages.

Find pages with many impressions but getting fewer clicks. This means you may be sitting somewhere on page 1 or 2 (even lower) but aren’t relevant enough to rank highly on search engine results pages).

You can start with your best-ranking page. For this example, my how-to guide on starting a coffee shop has ranked well for dozens of keywords. So I start with this page.

Go to Queries - Rows per page (100 or 250).

Here, I’ll spot niche topics that:

• I haven’t covered much in my content (I don’t have a section for it or a solid discussion about the topic).
• Broader and would require new content to provide more comprehensive information.
• Useful to add to my topic cluster.

Using Ahrefs’ Organic Keywords

Plug in one of your top pages on Site Explorer (if you don’t think of any, go to Top Pages, and there you’ll find your best-ranking pages).

Organic Search - Organic Keywords - Filter (11 to 100).

If you can’t move up the rankings from position 11 to page 1, there might be a search intent mismatch, so you must create new content about the topic (more on this below).

 

How to Choose A Keyword To Write About

After you’ve collected a list of niche keywords, there are things to consider to assess if a niche keyword is worth the time to create content (and optimize pages for).

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but my fundamental metrics/criteria when choosing a keyword to write about.

1. Search Volume

You need to know that people are searching for it.

• This means that it must fit at least one or two of these criteria:
• 100 or more monthly searches according to a keyword research tool (e.g., Ahrefs).
• Visible in Google autocomplete
• Appears in People Also Ask (you can use SearchResponse.io for free).
• Has a good number of impressions, according to Google Search Console (it only works if you have a similar article).
• Your personal experience or expertise tells you people are searching for it.

The last one is quite underrated. If you have enough expertise, you know emerging topics and specific subjects that people are currently or have been searching for.

One keyword does not equal one page. You can rank one article for 100s of keywords.

2. Competition

See if you can compete with the top-ranking pages for the keyword.

Here, people usually start with metrics like keyword difficulty (KD). At most, filter keywords with DR 30 or less, assuming you’ve got a new or lower authority domain to compete with.

Keyword difficulty doesn’t tell the entire story. You can choose a keyword with KD25, but ranking on the first page is challenging.

Instead, you manually type the keywords on Google and check the search engine results pages (SERPs).

• Here, I look for at least one or two of these in the top 5 or 10 spots:
• Websites with a DR lower than mine
• Forums or community-based sites (e.g., Quora
• Articles not updated in the past 3 years
• Low-quality AI scraped or spun sites
• Pages with thin content or very short articles (e.g., 500 words)

I recommend going after keywords if a ranking page with DR is lower than your site.

In theory, the lower the DR on top-ranking pages, the easier it is for you to compete with higher DR.

If every website on page one has a DR 80 or higher, that would be a red flag unless you’ve got DR 70 or higher to break through.

You can use Ahrefs to filter keywords with lower DR sites quickly.

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer - Filter - DR 30

3. Relevance

If a keyword is irrelevant to your site, don’t bother with it.

If you’re blogging about espresso machines and see a keyword about milk teas, don’t try to target it unless you want to expand on covering those topics.

Google ranks websites, not only pages.

The more comprehensive you blog about keywords within topic clusters, the more quickly you can gain topical authority, which makes it easy to rank for more niche keywords.

If you have set up a topical map, you can check it and see if a keyword you saw is included in it. I’ll discuss more about topical maps in my next blog posts.

But relevance is of top priority. Ignore it if it doesn’t have high relevance to your niche site.

4. Search Intent

You could have written 3,000 words on a topic yet couldn’t rank for the keyword because of an intent mismatch.

Search intent mismatches happen when the content you’re trying to rank doesn’t satisfy the search intent of the keyword.

There are four main types of search intent:

• Informational (e.g., “how long do espresso machines last?”)
• Navigational (e.g. “Breville login”)
• Transactional (e.g., “buy espresso machines Philippines”)
• Commercial (e.g., “best commercial espresso machines”)

Most niche site owners should be targeting informational and commercial investigations. These informational keywords are usually monetized with ads, although you can suggest affiliate keywords within the article (which serves as a solution to the problem).
Commercial investigational keywords work best with affiliates as you can insert individual product affiliates within the content.

For eCommerce SEO, you must target all four search intent types.

Categorize all your keywords based on their search intent. Then manually check on Google to see what types of pages are ranking for the keyword.

Next, to search intent, you’ve got to see the exact type of content Google favors on SERPs.

For instance, in one of my target keywords, “coffee business permits”, I could rank well on position #5 or #6 but probably won’t make it to top #1 given an intent mismatch.

Either I create new content that solely talks lists down business permits and licenses for coffee shops or have a new section on my coffee business guide.

This is where most of your time should be invested in. Investigate the entire SERPS, see what types of pages get ranked, what kind of information and format they use, and what specific entities you should include in your content.

5. User Satisfaction

Think about how long it will take you to answer a query.

If you’re targeting a “what is” keyword that can be quickly answered in one paragraph, don’t write an entire article about it. You can include it as part of a long-form guide about the parent topic.

One of the best keywords to target is when it is not answerable by short definitions but will require an entire article to explain the topic.

For instance, a keyword like “What is a good espresso machine for business?” would require an experienced and expert writer to showcase the best products with features to help aspiring coffee shop owners choose the best machines.

Bounce rate has nothing to do with the long a visitor stays on your website or how long they are engaged with your content before clicking back to the search results.

They could have been fully satisfied with your content - and it is the last click for the keyword. Your content has higher engagement signals than others, as it fully satisfies users’ search intent.

6. Audience Location

If you have an affiliate niche site, consider targeting a US audience, particularly if you monetize with ads. For affiliates, it can be best to target your own country to get products shipped for you for testing more quickly.

If you have an eCom website or a B2B site, you know your target audience, and best to include it when filtering your keywords on keyword research tools like Ahrefs.

Investigate Before Writing

The first half of the battle is won if you investigate a keyword before deciding whether to write about a keyword o not.

Being sure you can rank for a keyword with your content (quickly) helps you get some quick SEO wins early on for your website.

Niche Keywords for SEO FAQs

What is a good keyword niche score?

A good keyword niche score has many variables that come into play. There is no absolute niche score to see if a keyword is a good target for your content. Instead of relying on one niche score, check keyword difficulty, asses the top ranking pages, see if it’s part of your topic cluster, and look at the search volume - all these, you assess if a keyword is worth targeting.

How do I find searchable keywords?

To find searchable keywords, you can apply any of the following tips:

• Input seed keywords into Ahrefs or SEMRush and collect a list of matching and relevant keywords.
• See Google Autocomplete and related keywords below search engine results pages (SERPs). Tip: Don’t hit enter button.
• Find emerging keywords using Exploding Topics. See if there are any relevant topics in your space.

Why are niche keywords important?

Niche keywords are important because these are topics to target with your content. When creating new content for a blog, it is best to have a target keyword to optimize for. Include the niche keyword in the URL slug, meta title, meta description, and H1 and H2 tags, and sprinkle it across your content. I don’t care about keyword density.

How do I choose good keywords?

To choose suitable keywords, consider the following:

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty (and manually checking lower authority domains for your target keyword)
• Relevance
• Audience location
• Search intent
• User satisfaction (types and formats of ranking pages)

It’s subjective in every industry and context, so consider choosing good keywords manually.

What keywords are trending?

The trending keywords are different for every industry and business. An excellent tool to help you out is Exploding Topics by Brian Dean. They have a free newsletter where you can see emerging topics every week.

---

by Venchito Tampon Jr