How to test your article ideas for "search demand"
Answer to "What do readers of _______ search for in Google?" by:
Writing about things that no one is searching for almost guarantees that your blog will be a failure. You need to write about things that people are actually searching for in Google. And that is why keyword research is such an essential thing to master for any blogger and content marketer.
How to determine the full traffic potential of a keyword
We have some cool keywords to target and we know how many times people search for them in Google per month, which is called "search volume".
Having monthly search volume estimation on our hands, we can try to calculate how much search traffic we can get if we rank on the front page of Google for that keyword.
These percentages will of course be quite different for each search query, but SEO professionals just use these simplified averages to make traffic estimations.
Given a keyword with a search volume of 150 searches, for example, you'll get 45 clicks if you rank #1, 22 clicks if you rank #2, and 15 clicks if you rank #3. These numbers don't seem very exciting, do they? Especially when you consider how much work it would take to write a decent article on that topic. But in reality, you're going to get much more traffic than that. That's because your page doesn't rank for the keyword alone. It also ranks for many other related searches.
Different people may use different search queries to look for the exact same thing in Google. And Google is smart enough to understand that these searches are similar and therefore ranks the same page for all of them.
Search volume of a single keyword is a bad indicator of the total search traffic potential of the article on that topic. The search volume of our keyword is only 150 searches per month, which may lead to a conclusion that this keyword is not worth targeting. But suppose the article that ranks at position #2 for this keyword is generating over a hundred visitors per month from search. That's because it also ranks for a few more similar keywords.
Don't make content marketing decisions based on the search volume of a single keyword, look at the total search traffic of the top-ranking pages for that keyword.
Also, a better, deeper coverage of a topic will often lead to ranking in Google for more related keywords and therefore getting more search traffic in total.
How to find the best keyword to target
And that is exactly how I create my lists of content ideas:
And the next thing I want to know is how difficult it would be to outrank these articles and get all this traffic to myself.
How to determine your chances to rank in Google
Analyzing the search traffic potential of your article idea is a very simple and straightforward process. A much bigger challenge is to determine your chances to outrank the existing articles with your own one and get all this traffic to yourself. The truth be told, no one really knows for sure how exactly Google ranks pages in their search results. But what we can do is get clues from pages that already rank at the top of Google.
There are only two sources of information for us:
Backlink factors has the strongest correlation with Google ranking. Correlation is not causation, of course. But any SEO professional knows that links are uber-important for SEO. If the search results for your desired keyword have links from hundreds of websites, there's a very slim chance that you'll be able to outrank them, unless you get the same number of links to your own page.
We didn't study this at scale yet, but I'm pretty sure that the number of links to a page and it's total search traffic are well connected. That is why I always look at the total number of the linking websites to the pages that I want to replicate on my own blog. I always put the number of linking websites next to each URL in my content ideas list. My goal is to then cherry-pick the content ideas that get the most search traffic with the least backlinks. If they don't have a lot of websites linking to them, you'll easily get your own article to the top of Google with just a few backlinks. (note: Links will help you get in top 10, and once you're there, a lot of additional ranking factors will kick in). But that was a very simplified look at the concept of keyword difficulty. If you want to dive deeper, here's an article titled "How to Gauge Keyword Difficulty and Find the Easiest Keywords to Rank for".