Within months of publication, our article “resignation letter templates” shot to number one in the SERPs for a client.
If you know how to design for success before you start, this should come as no surprise.
But reaching number one for a single keyword wasn’t the most impressive thing about this article.
Because after about a year, it was ranking for 1,830 keywords.
This is not a typo. It wasn’t a coincidence.
And this article will explain exactly how to reproduce it.
Long or short content? Here’s why you’re asking the wrong question
“It depends.”
Everyone is looking for a trick or a trick. A silver bullet that prints money without you having to lift a finger.
But the unfortunate truth is that it “depends”.
Should you write a long and in-depth article or a short and snappy one? It depends. Should you produce high volume content or prune your site to limit the noise? It depends. Should you try to target one keyword per article or multiple? Again, it depends.
There is no single approach. (Despite what the LinkedIn gurus guarantee.)
Here’s a quick example:
✅ Typically, you would want to create an article around one main topic.
✅ Add your semantic topics and combine them with similar, but complementary, laser-focused content.
✅ Tie everything together in a loop with internal links to create a dense web of content.
✅ Then let topical authority + some high quality backlinks do their thing.
But this may not always be the case.
Imagine you are doing your keyword research. how do you And you see something like this:
Many closely related keywords with a similar intent. Volume on the low (long tail) side of the spectrum. Also with lower keyword difficulty targets.
The next step it is not to send all this to your favorite cheap writer. Or, God forbid, ChatGPT.
Because the wrong content or just plain bad content isn’t going to help you anyway.
Instead, it’s about rolling up your sleeves and doing some basic research.
First, compare your parent and child keywords (and “volume” vs. “potential volume”).
The raw data that an SEO tool spits out isn’t that useful, mostly because it’s garbage.
let me explain
For starters, the volume numbers are completely inaccurate! Look for volume in three different tools and you will undoubtedly get three different answers.
You know what else these three answers will have in common? They are completely off the mark for real life volume or clickthrough rate data you might see.
While others, like keyword difficulty, heavily skew things like the number of referring domains at the page level rather than the quality of those domains or even overall domain strength (like domain rank ) in the top 10 in any given SERP.
The point here is to focus less on the actual numbers and more on what the relationship of the numbers can tell you.
Check out this “construction project management” example. Search for it on Ahrefs, then dig into the “children” keyword ideas sorted under the “parent” main topic.
Now, you’ll see a list of closely related keywords that could be the perfect starting point for a new group of a dozen articles.
Or it can just be a very long and in-depth article.
How do you know?
Here’s a giant clue.
Compare the difference or ratio between volume (local, specific to this keyword) and traffic potential (as with other keywords). You can even compare global volume if you also attract international customers.
The fact that the ratio of traffic potential to volume here is ~4:1 tells me that you probably have a lot of very similar keywords that show the same content.
In other words, a very good, probably longer and more in-depth article on “build steps” will probably show up for many long-tail variations around the same topic.
That means you too do not do it you need to create unique pieces of content to rank for each.
And that’s exactly what happened.
We created in-depth content and took the #1 position for many similar keywords, with an effective figure of ~4x (or more) the traffic for this article compared to what any keyword tool could have gotten us originally said
The good news is that you don’t have to rely on intuition or decades of experience to verify this.
You just have to do a little extra work when you find these clues.
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Then compare the content currently ranking on each unique SERP to look for “overlaps” and “uniques”
SEO is not that hard at the end of the day.
Yes, there are some tricky elements to think about. But it’s not a complete mystery or a black box.
Heck. Google literally shows you exactly what works and what doesn’t. Hidden in plain sight.
This means that whenever there is any doubt about what people want to find out about a particular keyword, and therefore what Google wants to show, all you have to do is simply…
Google it!
Seriously, don’t overthink it.
Open the keyword we’ve been discussing, such as “build stages.” Then look at the actual content that is already ranking for that query.
What do they have in common? What do they all do well? What gaps do you think you can exploit? And last but not least, how much of that exact same content is showing for other closely related keywords you’ve found?
The easiest way to do this is a simple side-by-side comparison. So take your SERP “building steps”…
… and compare it to the ranking of the top 10 articles for “building process”.
Look at this?
Multiple articles that are exactly the same, appearing for different (though similar) keywords, that most keyword research tools say are actually different or different.
But in Google’s mind, they are no.
And at the end of the day, that’s the only prospect you should care about when it comes to SEO.
conclusion
Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees.
SEO tactics or metrics or “best practices” (in isolation) are limited at best or completely misleading at worst.
This means that the Ahrefs volume metric doesn’t matter. Just like Moz’s or Semrush, or [insert new cool hipster tool here].
At least not on his own. they don’t
What matters is how you interpret the data and how you see relationships or patterns in the SERPs to understand what’s going on beneath the surface.
This means that sometimes you want to make short, more frequent articles. While other times, you want to do the opposite.
As the saying goes, everything looks like a nail to the hammer man.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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