[Question] How Do You Rank One Blog Post for So Many Keywords?
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- Today, Matt answers a question from a student of the Six Figure Sales Funnel Training and Sales Funnel Blueprint about ranking a blog post for a multitude of keywords.
- The question refers to an Growbo blog post from 2010. See how Matt has rewritten it to be valuable and drive traffic.
Hi there. It’s Matt here from Growbo.com, and today I'm answering a question from another audience member who is also a student of our Six Figure Sales Funnel training and our Sales Funnel Blueprint Training. His name is Peter Nyiri.
I appreciate you being a student, Peter, and I'm going to answer your question because I think it's one that perhaps other audience members have when it comes to generating more traffic at the top of their funnel.
The Question
Peter says:
"I do have a quick question. How do you rank one blog post for so many keywords?"
Matt’s Answer
Well, let's take, for example, one of our most popular blog posts. It's this one: “17 Best Sales Funnel Examples to Get Your Site to Convert More Customers [Updated for 2018].”
The first version of this article came out in 2010. We were probably the first article on the Internet to talk about sales funnel examples in terms of digital marketing because there really wasn't a resource out there.
I thought, “I'm going to scratch my own itch and solve my own problem.” I wrote a long article about it, and we started to get traffic organically. I didn't know anything about keywords at the time. Well, I kind of knew the basics of SEO back then, but I wasn't trying to rank for keywords.
I had no idea that there would be so much rising interest in sales funnels in general over time, but as I noticed that more and more traffic started to come in for this blog post, that's the typical path you want and expect to see for any evergreen piece of content.
You might see a little spike at the beginning where you initially promote it to your email list and your social media channels. Then, over time, what you're going to see if it's going to kind of plateau, and then go up again. Google might send it more traffic. They may say, “Well, our users are searching and finding the article, and it's really useful, so let's give it more traffic."
It’s going to happen gradually as more people find it, organically and naturally link to it, and spread it on their own social media channels. Obviously, that may happen faster if you are working aggressively to promote it.
Getting back to the point. We saw traffic coming in for this, so a few years later we updated it. That brought in more traffic because we made it much more comprehensive. I believe we doubled the length of it and added some more examples.
In 2018, I figured we should update it again so that it still is fresh and all the examples are up-to-date. Some of the very big websites had changed since our last update, so we did that.
Traffic has grown again. The post is ranking for, as Peter was talking about, a variety of keywords. This is an example of a post that ranks for a wide variety of keywords like "sales funnels," "sales funnel," singular, "sales funnel examples," and even terms related to clickfunnels. We get people coming to this page who search for clickfunnels and find this page instead.
Now, let me give you a peek behind the curtain here. This is an example of part of the template that we use, and we're much more sophisticated today with our content marketing process, the team and I. We will actually consciously choose one keyword to focus on for each new blog article that we come out with.
The answer to Peter's question is that we're not actually trying to rank for multiple keywords. We just focus on one, and naturally we will see traffic start to come in for that. The way you could say that we expand the number of keywords that a post is ranking for is that we will actually go back, as I was alluding to in the example of the sales funnel article, and add more content based on the searches that we see coming in for that page.
We will try to interpret the intention behind those searches and add on the content to make it longer, more comprehensive, and naturally rank for more keywords. It's kind of like a concentric circle that's expanding: smaller, bigger, bigger, bigger, and bigger as we add more content and get more comprehensive with it.
So to review, the short answer is that if you want to create a piece of content that is going to rank for a multitude of keywords, don't try to do that. Instead, what you want to do is focus on creating high-quality content and focus on one keyword that has medium to high competition. If it's your first time creating an in-depth article, you should probably go for the medium competition, see how well you can rank for that and how much organic traffic you can get coming in for that. Then go for the bigger fish, so to speak.
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So until next time, my name is Matt Ack in the Matt hat, delivering your daily dose of Matt Hacks.
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