How to Perform Keyword Research for an Existing Website (and Get Quick Organic Traffic Gains)

Traffic.

It’s the lifeblood of any online business.

Without it, generating leads and feeding the sales funnel is next to impossible.

Ask any marketer how to get more traffic and you’ll inevitably hear things like:

Write more engaging content.

Send more emails.

Invest in paid traffic.

Focus on SEO.

And, while all play an important part in the overall strategy…

It’s not necessarily the best place to start.

The truth is:

You can get QUICK traffic gains without spending money on ads or writing any new content at all.

How?

Derive more value from your existing assets.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to find ALL the low hanging fruit on your website and turn it into quick traffic gains. It is the first thing I do when performing content audits for new clients.

This strategy will usually help an established website increase it’s organic traffic 20-25% in a few short months. In fact, this exact strategy helped me take an article from #8 to #2 in Google overnight, and increase organic traffic to another post 402% in 30 days:

Pretty cool, right?

Let’s get started.

Identify the right audience

When performing keyword research for an existing website there are three different data sources to look at:

1. Analytics data
2. Contextual data
3. Rankings data

In this tutorial, we’re going to be focusing on “rankings” data. Specifically, which keywords you have historically ranked for, as well as the keywords your site is currently ranking for. This will provide visibility into the immediate growth opportunities on your website.

SEMrush

There are only a small handful of tools out there that provide quick access to both historical and real-time rankings data. The tool we’ll be using today is SEMrush - it's my go-to keyword research tool.  

Note: If you want to dive deeper and explore all the tool’s feature, check out the 10,000 word review I put together here.

Step #1: Collect the rankings data

For the tutorial, I’ll be using this blog to demonstrate the process.

Quick side note: Big shout out to my friend Nick Eubanks over at SEOauv. His “Master Keyword Research in 7 Days” course introduced me to the strategy outlined in this post.

Head over to SEMrush and log into your account:

Copy the URL of the website and paste it into the search bar on the main dashboard:

Hit “search”.

From the “Domain Analytics” overview report, select the “Organic Research” tab:

This report will show all the keywords a site currently ranks for in the top 100 search results in Google.

For example, you can see my blog has roughly 1,900 keywords ranking in Google’s top 100 organic search results. If I was to bid on this same subset of keywords in AdWords, it would cost me about $8,800 a month.

Scroll further down the page and you’ll find the organic search positions table:

The table will show:

Step #2: Export the rankings data

In less than a minute you’ve managed to find all the keywords your website currently ranks for, along with a number of other valuable data points.

Now what?

The next step is to export this data into an excel spreadsheet and extract actionable insights.

At the top right corner of the organic positions table you’ll see a button to export the data:

Click the button and download the data into an excel spreadsheet.

All the data from the SEMrush web app will be transferred:

You can see in the screenshot above that the column headings align exactly with the table headings shown within SEMrush.

Step #3: Filter the rankings data

So. Much. Data!

Where do you start?

Select the "Filter" button at the top of the spreadsheet. This will add a dropdown to the top of each column to help better sort the data:

Click the dropdown arrow at the top of the “Search Volume” column and sort from largest to smallest.

This will return a list of all the keywords your site currently ranks for in the top 100 search results, sorted by search volume from highest to lowest.

There is a lot of data here, so before we jump in any further let’s add some additional filters on top of the data to make it a little less visually intimidating and easier to follow.

Select the “Positions” tab.

Next, head back over to the “Home” tab and click the “Conditional Formatting” tab, select the “Color Scales” option and choose the “Red – Yellow – Green” scale:

This will instantly provide a better visual representation of the data.

You can see the largest traffic opportunities from organic search, and the yellow-red highlighted cells will show all the keywords with lowest but existing rankings.

This is your low hanging fruit.

Note: You might not be able to realistically rank for some of the listed keywords, and some of the others may not even be relevant to your business.

For example, “Reddit one piece” is a search phrase that gets 6,600 monthly organic searches, but I have no interest in ranking for it.

On the other hand, there are keywords like “google adwords keyword tool”, “adwords keyword planner”, and “moz open site explorer” that are relevant to the website, but I will not be able to realistically rank for those terms any time soon.

We’re not going to invest any time or energy focusing in those areas.

Step #4: Find quick growth opportunities

This is where you mine for keyword gold. The key is to find all the keywords that:

1. Are most relevant to your target audience
2. Already rank in positions 6-30

Create a new sheet titled “Keyword Opportunities”. Copy and paste the headings across from the first spreadsheet:

Next, jump back over to the first sheet and start manually reviewing the keywords. This is where the conditional formatting will make your life a LOT easier.

In the spreadsheet, you will notice all the keywords ranking on the first three pages are colored in green:

As you scroll through the list only focus on the terms highlighted in green.

Very quickly you'll be able to find some golden opportunities.

For example:

This blog currently ranks #6 for the search term “how to promote your blog” which gets 1,300 monthly searches:

Since roughly 67% of the clicks go to the top 5 search positions...

I know that by improving the rankings for this search term just a few positions will instantly send more traffic to the site. So, I’ll copy that row and paste it into the “Keyword Opportunities” tab:

Head back over to the first sheet and continue analyzing the green cells.

Bingo!

Three more opportunities:

link building strategies (590 monthly searches)
lead magnet (390 monthly searches)
seo case study (390 monthly searches)

Continue pasting new keywords into the “Opportunities” spreadsheet.

As you can see, this process scales very easily.

Step #5: Scaling the process for larger websites

Right about now, some of you might be saying:

What if my website ranks for tens of thousands of keywords?

Great question.

After all, even with conditional formatting, sorting through enormous lists of keywords is a very tedious and time-consuming task.

Luckily, there is an easy workaround for this.

Head back to your spreadsheet, click the “Positions” column and deselect all the numbers:

Next, re-select numbers 6-20.

Now, you’re left with a spreadsheet that only contains keywords ranking bottom of page 1, or page 2 in Google:

These are the lowest of the low hanging fruit; the keywords you can target for quick organic traffic gains.

Step #6: Prioritize the shortlist

The goal here is to get fast traffic gains.

So, it’s important to identify which keywords from the shortlist have the lowest level of competition – the ones that will be easiest to boost rankings.

Click the “Competition” tab in the “Keyword Opportunities” sheet and sort from lowest to highest:

The level of competition is rated on a scale of 0 to 1.

A general rule of thumb:

Anything below 0.4 is a good target. However, if you have a high authority site you can shoot a little higher.

Regardless, make it a priority to first target the keywords with the lowest level of competition. You’ll find it easier (and quicker) to improve rankings.

Additional ways to assess keyword competition:

The SEMrush competition data is pulled from Google AdWords PPC data. Although this provides a decent relative assessment of competition, it's wise to look at some additional organic indicators.

#1: Domain Authority

The #1 factor in page's ability to rank for a given keyword is the authority of the page. One of the best ways to assess page authority is to use the Moz Bar chrome extension. 

Once the extension is activated, type in one of the search terms identified in the spreadsheet above:

Pay attention to the authority of pages ranking higher in the SERPs. When there are sites with similar authority outranking you, it is a good sign quick gains can be made. 

#2: Ahrefs Batch Analysis

Another major ranking factor is the number of quality links pointing to a page. 

Paste each of the page URLs outranking your post into the Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool:

This will quickly show you how your post stacks up against the competition in terms of link profile:

By looking at the SEMrush keyword competition metric, analyzing page authority and competitor link profiles, there is no reason why I can't climb into the top 5 positions for the search term "seo case study". 

Step #7: Optimize for better rankings

The final step in this process is optimizing the existing content to improve rankings. There are a number of ways to do this.

After the shortlist of keywords has been sorted by level of competition, start analyzing the URLs ranking for each keyword.

For example, my link building strategies post used to rank in position #7, but has recently fallen to the bottom of the first page.

After looking closer at the content, I quickly get a good idea as to why that might have happened.

The post has received almost 4,000 shares:

Has a solid backlink profile:

And decent on-page optimization.

BUT...

It was published back in 2014:

The content is due for a refresh.

Here is a quick overview of how I would optimize this post to move it up in the rankings:

A general rule of thumb…

When identifying areas of optimization in your existing content, look at the following:

Publish date: Make sure you're updating content every 6-12 months.

Detail: With over 2 million blog posts published every single day, competition is more fierce than ever. Audit the competition every 6 months and make sure your content is still the most in-depth resource on the topic. 

On-Page SEO: Make sure all key on-page elements - title tag, heading tags, URL, internal links, anchor text, LSI and alt text - are optimized for the seed keyword and long tail variations.

Backlinks: The number of quality inbound links pointing to a page is still a top three ranking factor. Look at the link profile of your content and cross-compare it against the competition. Look for at how (and where) the competition is getting links, and replicate them. 

Behavioral Signals: I'm a firm believer that UXO is fast becoming the new SEO. With the development of more advanced machine learning and the evolution of Google's RankBrain algorithm, user intent and behavioral signals are quickly become the most important ranking factor. As a result, webmasters need to be doing everything they can to secure high click-through from the SERPs, lower bounce rates and longer time on site. 

Optimize title tags to make them more attention-grabbing, improve page load speed and use multi-media assets like video, images and infographics to keep people on your site longer. Internal links can also help channel readers deeper into your site.

Results

Action speaks louder than words.

Back in 2014 I wrote a monster review of the SEMrush tool.

The post ranked bottom of page one for a number of search terms that sent a stream of organic to the blog.

I performed the keyword research exercise outlined above and noticed that rankings for the post had been sliding in recent months.

Here is a list of the things I did:

In just 10 days the post has jumped from #8 up to #2:

And traffic to the post increased over 73%:

The post is even getting first page rankings for major branded search terms:

I'll be applying this strategy to several posts on the blog over the next 90 days and predict it'll increase the blog's organic traffic 15-20%.

Case study to come :)

Are you ready to get quick organic traffic gains?

Before you spend hours researching new keywords and investing a ton of money on paid ads…

Focus on extracting more traffic from your existing assets.

It’s one of the easiest and most scalable ways to see quick organic traffic gains in any industry.