Once you have a list of keywords to target, you should throw them all into one Excel file with three columns:
- The keyword
- The search volume for that keyword
- The difficulty for that keyword
For example, here’s what my list of keywords looked like for Statology:
You will now organize a content plan so that you have can have a specific order of which keywords to write articles about first.
To start, we will sort all of our keywords in the following manner:
- First, sort by difficulty from low to high
- Then, sort by search volume from high to low
To do this in Excel, click the Data tab along the top, then click Sort. Then, sort by difficulty from smallest to largest followed by search volume from largest to smallest:
The following screenshot shows how I did this for a list of keywords I had for Statology:
Once I click OK, the list of keywords becomes sorted:
The idea is that the first articles you write on your site should target keywords that are very easy to rank for since your domain authority will be very low when you first start. And in terms of the order you should write your articles in, you want to target keywords that have low difficulty and the most search volume possible.
For example, suppose we have two keywords:
- Keyword A: Difficulty = 0, Volume = 1200
- Keyword B: Difficulty = 0, Volume = 700
Both keywords have incredibly low difficulty, but we would want to write an article about keyword A first since it has the potential to bring in more traffic. We’ll still write an article targeting keyword B, but we’ll write it after the article targeting keyword A.
By sorting your keywords in this manner, you have a natural content plan to follow. For example, first I would want to write an article about “p values”, then an article about “post hoc analysis” and so on.
One thing to watch out for are keywords that are essentially the same, but are spelled slightly different. For example, the keyword “post hoc analysis” is the same as “post-hoc analysis” so I would make sure not to write two different articles targeting these keywords. I would simply write one article about post hoc analysis.
Once you start ranking on the front page for these easy keywords, your domain authority will grow, and the time it takes to rank new articles on the front page will go down.
Over time, you can begin to go after keywords that have higher difficulty and higher volume as your domain authority grows because you’ll actually have enough authority to rank on the front page of Google for more difficult keywords.
Once you start ranking for more difficult keywords, you’ll earn even more traffic, and the traffic flywheel starts spinning faster and faster. It’s a beautiful thing.
How Often Should You Post New Articles?
One of the most common questions I receive from people is:
“How many articles should I post per week?”
The simple answer is that the more articles you post per week, the more articles you have that can rank on the front page of Google, and the higher your organic search traffic is likely to be.
As a rule of thumb, I recommend publishing at least one new article per week, but ideally you should aim for two to three per week to grow traffic faster.
The important thing is to get into a routine of posting a certain amount of articles per week and sticking to that routine for months at a time. The more you often you publish, the easier it becomes.
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