Driving organic traffic using question-based keywords

If you’re looking to drive organic traffic to your website and engage visitors surfing the web, then you’re seriously missing a trick if you’re not producing question-based content.

To illustrate this we are going to use one of our customers, a company called Preppr which is a social media automation posting tool.

The tool we are going to use to do our analysis is called Ahrefs. There are many tools out there to do keyword analysis but this is our preferred tool. We are going to start by clicking on Keywords Explorer.

Social exploration

To begin the analysis we need a primary keyword in our customer’s niche, so the word “instagram” would work well for Preppr.

We are going to run the search for Google’s search engine for the US market as this is where the target audience is based. Unsurprisingly the search volume of this keyword is gargantuan at 172 million.

What’s important to note here is the Keyword Difficulty (KD) score which is a measure of how difficult it is to rank for the term “instagram” on the first page of Google. 96 is incredibly difficult, which doesn’t come as a surprise.

Question-based keywords

Ahrefs provides a range of different keyword categories. One of which are question-based keywords. This is a feature that this SEO agency London uses a lot, and one which we are going to explore in more detail within this post.

After clicking on ”Questions” on the left-hand menu we can see Ahrefs has found 347K keywords where Instagram appears in the question.

This is clearly too many keywords to analyse, so we need to apply some filters so that we can get a view of only the keywords that are relevant to us and worth our time trying to write content to rank for those keywords.

To do this we are going to apply to a maximum KD score of 10 and minimum Volume (monthly search volume) of 1,000. This has now brought the number of relevant keywords down to 41 – a much more manageable number.

Casting our eye down the list we can see that most of these keywords such as solar panels central coast would be relevant to our customer’s niche.

When we focus on the question at the top, “does instagram notify when you screenshot a story” we can see it has a KD score of 0 and 6.7K searches a month making it an attractive keyword to try and rank for.

Checking the SERP’s

However, before we make a decision we need to assess the current status of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) to really get a sense of how competitive the keyword is.

By clicking on SERP, Ahrefs will display the search results in descending order from 1 through to 100 along with the associated DR for each site. The DR or Domain Rating is a measure of the authority of a website.

What we are looking for in the SERP view is for any websites in top 10 positions which do not have much authority, or which have low DR values.

We can see that in 8th and 9th position there are websites with DR’s of 20 and 7 respectively. Moreover these two sites have very few backlinks to the content.

Bearing in mind that our customer’s site, preppr.com, carries a DR of 53 we would be confident that with a well written, seo-optimised article and one or two backlinks we could get them to rank for this question (search term). This would potentially add a few thousand visits to their website a month.

Conclusion

In this post we’ve taken you through step-by-step on how to find high-intent organic traffic opportunities using question-based keywords. That’s quite a mouthful, we know.

Question-based keywords are just one of the keyword research features offered by Ahrefs. Other features like also rank for and having the same terms provide other new opportunities for SEO content creation.

Outside the realm of Keywords explorer are a whole host of other really valuable SEO research and analysis tools that will help you become a better content marketer. One of which is a content gap analysis.

You can find a link to the video version of this post here.

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