What Content Should Be Created: An SEO Opportunity Index

SEO Opportunity Index

Assess your current keywords and focus your SEO strategy on the things that matter.

Using the following metrics, we create an SEO Opportunity Index for each keyword/topic:

  • Monthly Search Volume: Demonstrates the potential of the topic.
  • Match with target users,%: Indicates whether potential customers are interested in these keywords.
  • Expertise Matching%: A quantitative representation of your ability to create good content on a topic.

An example of using the SEO Opportunity Index

Let’s take the point of this article (“SEO KPIs”) as an example.

Monthly search volume indicator

At the moment, I need a quantitative estimate that will give me an answer to a simple question:

  • Is it worth investing in this theme?

The most manageable way to answer this question is to compare the number of searches on the topic of interest with known keywords.

We quantify this indicator as follows:

  • 0% – no active search (in our case, we are talking about less than ten searches per month)
  • 20% – some search activity (up to 100 searches per month)
  • 100% – the volume of requests is comparable to other high converting topics

Intersection with the interests of target users,%

Our target users of BSC Designer looking for “SEO KPIs”? I think a lot of users are interested in the general idea. Still, few of them are looking for a systematic approach to tracking SEO metrics and aligning the optimization strategy with the overall marketing strategy.

I think 30% of the people who make this search query are our potential customers. Of course, I have no data to support this hypothesis. This is just an “educated guess” based on our experience in analyzing other similar keywords.

Compliance with expert knowledge,%

Do we have sufficient experience to write articles on this topic? My checklist looks like this:

  • We do a lot of SEO work internally. We focus on content marketing.
  • Presentations about our approach to SEO at the conference received positive reviews.
  • The topic is in line with our core expertise in KPIs and strategy implementation.

To assess the conformity of expert knowledge, we can use the following scale:

  • 0% – we do not know this area. This topic is not (yet) for us.
  • 20% – we have some knowledge of the topic, or we can order a part of the work done by third-party experts.
  • 80% – 100% – we have a lot of practical experience in this area.

People no longer need content created by cheap copywriters. If we want our content to have authority, we must write about our own experiences.

Why We Don’t Track Competition

  • The number of competitors in the search result can supposedly help us find easy targets.

Many experts recommend tracking your competition metric. They suggest focusing on keywords with high search volume and low competition. We do not use this indicator because I do not consider it important for decision-making.

If a theme has a high SEO capability index, we will invest in it anyway.

Financial KPIs for SEO

SEO strategy is closely related to ROI. There are various ways to drive traffic to your website. In our case, we were choosing between paid ads and content creation.

Experience shows that Sponsored Ads are a bad source of leads for us:

  • and the cost goes up
  • and your engagement and conversion rates go down.

Conclusion (at least at this stage):

From a long-term perspective, quality content is more effective than paid ads.

At the same time, we can use paid ads for other purposes, first of all, for a / b testing of some ideas.

ROI of content marketing

What about content marketing ROI metrics?

First, let’s define this metric for paid advertising :

  • Investment is how much we pay per click + landing page development.
  • Profit is the ruble value of leads.

The ROI of content marketing is not easy to calculate:

  • Part of the investment is unclear. It includes the time it takes to write quality content and invest in your learning (the books you read, the conferences you attend, and so on).
  • Profit is also difficult to calculate. Constantly relevant content is like a perpetual motion machine, capable (subject to updates) for a long time to generate good leads.

The key question is: why? Why do we need to know ROI? In our case, the reason is to compare content marketing with its closest competitor (paid ads). The results were unambiguous: