How to write a blog
A few months ago, I ran an experiment to see if we could get backlinks using ads. And it worked decently, but there were some obvious flaws in my process. So I talked with my buddy Josh who runs Ahrefs ’blog, and we strategized a way to do this right. Meaning we’d create a new link-worthy page, get links to it, and have a cool case study to share with you. So today we’re kicking off a three-part series where I’ll show you how to strategically write a blog post that generates links. Then in part 2, I’ll show you how we built links to that page, and we’ll finish off the series with where it all began. An ad campaign specifically designed to generate links passively. I’m pumped and if you are too then stay tuned.
[music] So this is part one of our three-part series and I’ll be dropping the other videos over the next two weeks. So if you’re not subscribed to our channel, then make sure to do that now because the videos will go hand-in-hand and I don’t want you to miss out on the rest of this series. And if you’re watching this at a future time, then feel free to binge watch these and implement as you go. Alright, so I’ve created a lot of videos on content creation and link building. But what I haven’t talked about much is how they’re connected. And there are multiple facets to this. The first and most obvious is content quality. It’s easier to get links to an awesome piece of content than to something mediocre. And I’m sure you’ve heard this advice a million times but that’s because it’s true. The second factor that often gets overlooked is whether the topic is actually “linkable.” And this comes down to searcher intent.
You need to ask yourself, why are these people searching for the topic first place? For example, let’s say you’ve created a post targeting the query “best decaf coffee.” Who do you think would be interested in searching for this on Google, or what type of people might click it if they saw it on social media? Probably people who want to drink decaf coffee. The vast majority of people probably aren’t bloggers and journalists or anyone that has the power to link to your page. And as a result, you’ll see that none of the top 10pages have many backlinks pointing at them. Now, what about a topic like “coffee stats?” Who do you think would be searching for something like that? Probably bloggers, journalists, and people who are looking for supporting facts to include in their articles. In fact, words like “stats,” “statistics,” and “facts” are very common modifiers people search for when writing content. And this applies to tons of industries. For example, this page on coffee stats has584 referring domains pointing at the page. And referring domains are unique websites that link to the page. Nerd wallet’s statistics page on average household credit card debt has nearly 2,500 referring domains. And multiple pages for the query, “marriage statistics” have hundreds of referring domains. Bottom line: people link to stats pages when citing facts and figures in their content.
And the third facet is timing. Even if your content is great, it won’t translate into links if it reaches the right people at the wrong time — at least not in the immediate future. But nail the timing, and your chances of getting a link increases exponentially. And we’ll get into timing later on in the series. So the first thing we need to do is find aproven topic that’s “link-worthy.” So to find a topic for our site, I went to Keywords Explorer and searched for a bunch of broad keywords related to our business, like “seo,””search engine optimization,” “content marketing,” “keyword research,” “link building,” and “blogging.” Next, I went to the Phrase match report, clicked on the Include filter, and added a list of keyword modifiers like “stat,” “stats,” “statistics,” “fact,” and “facts.” Finally, I clicked on the “Any” tab so the list would show us keyword ideas that include any of these modifiers combined with our original list of seeds. Now, a lot of these look like great topics for our site, but since our primary focus is on SEO, “seo statistics” is the most relevant query to our business. So that’s the one we chose. Now, it’s important to note that creating a “stats” page isn’t necessarily about generating a ton of search traffic. So if you see lower search volumes like this, then there’s no need to worry. These pages are about generating a ton of links.
Then you can use that page to “power” other posts or even your money pages. For example, our study on featured snippets is our most linked-to post on Ahrefs’ blog. And if you visit that page, you’ll see that we link to a couple of our tool landing pages, helping them rank higher in Google for queries we care about. Now, if you’re having trouble understanding how this SEO strategy works, we have a full video on it called “The Middleman Method, ”so I’ll link that up in the description. Alright, so if we go back to Keywords Explorer and look at the SERP for “seo statistics,” you’ll see that these three pages have over4,200 referring domains pointing at them. Meaning, there are more than enough link prospects we can reach out to as soon as we create our SEO stats post. Alright, so the next thing we needed to do was to create the stats page. Now, let’s have a moment of honesty here. It’s tough to make a page of stats truly stand out amongst other pages. They’re all going to be curated lists and there’s definitely going to be overlap between competing pages. So to ensure we had the best page we could make, we thought about what a user would want to see when they land on the page. Basically, people are searching for curated information so they can add bits and bobs to their posts to support their claims.
