The Strategy
Capitalising on Low Hanging Keywords
Instead of purely focusing on the English speaking countries, we turned our attention to other markets and found that South America had an unusually high amount of traffic which was converting well.
Knowing that the site was in two of the most competitive niches with many big brands ranking for the most important high volume searches, we focused on targeting low-hanging keyword opportunities that could help build the site’s topical relevance.
Low-hanging keywords are search terms that you’re already ranking for just outside of the first page of Google’s search results i.e. between position 11 and 30.
You can find these keywords using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool, via the Organic keywords report.
Filter the results by position and select a minimum of 11 and a maximum of 30.
The idea is to pick keywords that with some content optimisation, will be able to break into the first page of the search results.
Top tip: you can filter the results further by only looking at the terms that have a Keyword Difficulty of 25 or less. These are the keywords that Ahrefs deem relatively easy to target.
After choosing the target keywords, we then shaped and optimised the content by identifying content gaps between the top ranking competing pages and the client’s page, optimising headings and meta descriptions, reworking the internal linking strategy and optimising the backlink anchor text strategy.
Keyword Research
Considering we were targeting the South American market, we used search data and translations to find the correct keywords to use. Our keyword research was carried out with two main goals in mind:
- Identifying long-tail keywords that were less competitive due to lower search demand
- Identifying high converting keywords with a strong user intent
By selecting keywords like this, we were able to craft the content on the website to ensure that they addressed exactly what the searcher was looking for.
As a result, the conversion rate for the site increased along with the site’s revenue.
International Outreach Strategy
Link building for the South American market (which isn’t as saturated or advanced in SEO in comparison to the UK or the USA for example) is perhaps the most rewarding action we undertook.
This is because South American websites have not been bombarded with outreach emails as much as UK/USA sites meaning that the response rates were much higher.
The strategy involved putting together a prospect list by identifying website’s that our client’s website didn’t have a backlink from, but the top ranking competing domains (for the most important keywords that we wanted to rank for) did.
We then created bespoke outreach pitches in the prospect website’s respective language (i.e. Portuguese for Brazilian websites) highlighting the value that a backlink to our client’s website would have for their audience.
Getting mentions from these popular sites across the continent served as a strong signal to Google that the client’s website is a trusted and authority voice.
As a result of our link building campaign, the site’s link velocity saw consistent growth over the course of a year.