Justin Borge – Turning Searches Into Traffic

A course on Keyword Research and Content Strategy. Take our process and use it for yourself, use it for your business and your clients.

Justin Borge - Turning Searches Into Traffic

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Intro to Course

How to Get Help & Make Requests

1. Getting Set Up 🚩

We walk you through setting up the exact template we use for our paying clients, then give you a tour of how to use Ahrefs, the main tool we’ll be focusing on throughout the rest of the course.

Installing Our Google Sheets Template

A Note on Free Trials

Ahrefs Keyword Research Overview

2. Identifying Your True Competitors ⚡

The first step in completing your spreadsheet is to identify the *right* competitors to analyze. We never skip these three methods.

Ask Your Client Directly (using these questions)

Use Sparktoro to Find Sites Your Audience Trusts

Use Ahrefs to Find Competing Domains

3. Creating a Master List of Everything Your Competition Ranks For 🔥

Once you’ve identified the right competitors to analyze, it’s time to export all their SEO data into an organized, searchable Master List. Find a term you want to rank for? Use the Master List to open the exact page on your competitors site to take notes on what you can do better.

Exporting (Relevant) SEO Data Per Each Competitor

Adding the Data to Google Sheets, Removing Duplicates and Organizing

Stylizing, Formatting, and Making the Data Readable

How to Interpret The Master List (and put it to good use)

4. Planning Your Marketing Funnel Around Easy-To-Rank-For Keywords 🍰

Reviewing the structure of a Marketing Funnel, then walking through the process of organizing each phase of yours based around traffic-driving keyword opportunities.

Importing Your Master List Into Ahrefs to Make it Filterable

🎈 Resource: Save this Funnel Image

Applying Informational Intent Filters and Exporting Back Into Google Sheets

Applying Commercial Intent Filters and Exporting Back Into Google Sheets

Organizing the Data and Making Each Tab Readable

5. Creating an Expert-Level Content Strategy 🧙‍♂️

It’s one thing to come up with a bunch of data. It’s another thing to actually be confident interpreting said data, then knowing exactly how to put it to good use.

What Topic Clusters Are and Why They’re Important for Growing Your Traffic

How to Plan a Topic Cluster Using Your Completed Spreadsheet

6. Estimating ROI in SEO and Content Marketing 💰

Forecasting ROI is often an abstract hurdle for SEO pros, while managing expectations is crucial for avoiding disappointed clients. Everyone needs to be on the same page about how long it might take to see substantial results and how those results can reasonably be forecasted (to justify the up-front investment).

In this section you’ll learn how we go about projecting future traffic, and most importantly, future earnings for the businesses we consult for. Be conservative in your estimates, demonstrate you know what you’re doing and leave room for them to be surprised by your successes down the road. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than vice versa.

Using the ROI Calculator

🎉 BONUS: Find the Keywords Your Competitors Share (that you’re missing out on)

The Ahrefs Content Gap tool allows you to analyze and compare multiple websites against one another. The tool can show you (quite granularly) which keywords that Site A, Site, B, and Site C all share with one another that Site D…does not. You can also filter the keywords you discover by volume, difficulty, and cost per click.

It doesn’t take long to do if you know what you’re doing, but this kind of information can be extremely valuable to a business, and we know from first-hand experience that they’re willing to pay for it. (We charge $299 per report. Wouldn’t be surprised if we could charge more, but we feel guilty because it doesn’t take us very long to actually do).

How to Do a Content Gap Analysis