SEO Power Plays #38

Author

Jeremy Moser
March 24, 2024

Ready to ditch that frustrating keyword research grind? There's a smarter way to find high-potential targets – one that has nothing to do with backlinks.

The trick is spotting SERPs riddled with outdated content, slow-loading pages, or mismatched titles – basically, where Google is desperate for something better.

TopicRanker is my secret weapon for this. It pinpoints those easy-win keywords and gives you the tools to outrank the competition fast.

Today, I’ll show you how to use this tool to:

  • Uncover keywords where the top ranking posts are lacking

  • Find out exactly what they’re missing (and how you can do better)

I’ll go over the first two in this issue – they also have a generative AI feature that helps you create content briefs, outlines, titles, and descriptions once you’re done the research.

Prefer a video walkthrough? Check out this seven-minute overview 👇

Step 1. Sign up for TopicRanker.

You can give it a try for as low as $9/mo right on TopicRanker.com.

Step 2. Choose a seed topic and pull up the weakness report.

You can either choose a seed topic from the list provided when you enter your URL or you can enter your own seed term.

For this tutorial, I’m analyzing the website falconriver.co. Here, I chose the seed term “find a business for sale”.

You get the estimated searches for the seed topic, followed by specific keyword suggestions that fall under that parent topic.

Step 3. Dive deeper to find competitor weaknesses.

I uncovered ‘empire flippers alternative’ as a potential search query to target.

How? By looking at the ‘Weaknesses of Competing Sites’ tab. 

TopicRanker finds keywords you should target based on actual weaknesses and problems in the top ten results, such as:

❓—> missing keywords in the meta title

🔢—> low word count

🟰—> poor readability

⏳—> slow page loading

🕜—> outdated content

TopicRanker reveals the top 10 results in the SERP and highlights as many problems as it can find. 

For example:

TopicRanker finds a SERP where the top 10 results have a slow load time.

Here’s a SERP where there’s a search intent mismatch – the title tag doesn’t match what the user’s searching for:

There are a few other issues that TopicRanker will flag too. 

Using this process makes it super easy to spot hidden ranking opportunities (based on weak SERPs). 

On top of recommending new keywords you should aim for, it also scans your existing content to see which ones rank in the top 10 search results already and what needs to be fixed. 

That way, you can rank faster by addressing the current flaws in your content.

The next step is to create world class content that satisfies search intent, incorporates relevant keywords, and provides an excellent user experience. 

-Jeremy

(big thanks to TopicRanker for sponsoring this newsletter edition – you can try it for free here).