Harness the power of page TWO of Google

Helloooo content comrades!

It’s your friendly neighborhood content guy.

Today I’m going to show you how to leverage something most content marketers don’t even think about: page two of Google.

In this issue:

• Main course: How to use p.2 of Google to your advantage

• Snack: Beard Brand’s massively stacked mini media empire on buzz cuts

• Morsels: Headlines from CMI, Moz, Neil Patel and more

Let’s dig in.

Main course: How to leverage the power of p.2 of Google

At risk of stating the stupendously obvious, in the Google game, we’re all striving to be on the first page.

That’s a no brainer.

And it’s true: there’s usually not much traffic on the second page of Google. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use p.2 of Google as an absolutely key part of your SEO and content marketing strategy.

So what do we use it for? We can use p.2 of Google to tell us where to focus our resources in order to rank on p.1 for a lot more stuff.

Let me explain that a bit more first, and then I’ll show you exactly how I do it.

Here’s what most people do: publish a bunch of content > pray > some % of it ends up on p.1.

And then …. ???

Usually, no one ever does anything else. It’s almost as if they’re throwing handfuls of darts at the same time and just living with whatever happens to stick somewhere.

But what if we started picking darts up, walking over to the dart board, and sticking them in the bullseye by hand?

That’s basically what I’m talking about.

Any company with any kind of SEO strategy — over a long enough time frame — will end up with some % of their content on the first page of Google for some % of keywords. These are the winners. More accurately, this is where we’re already winning.

But an even bigger portion of those will end up on p.2.

These are not winners. But they ARE almost winning.

By listing our content on p.2, Google is telling us they like this content. They’re practically begging us to make it just a LITTLE better so they can show it to their users.

Our job is to take the almost-winners and turn them into actual winners. I.e., we we can push content on p.2 to p1.

Let’s look at an example.

We’re going to look at Beard Brand because I was researching them for this issue anyway.

We’re going to plug Beard Brand into Ahrefs and find their top organic content: Site Explorer > Top pages. In this screen, we’ll be able to see all of their best organic content.

Beard Brand has 495 pages of organic content. We can also see their top keyword for each page, which is what Ahrefs uses to calculate it’s position metric.

But the top content is already winning.

We want to find the stuff on p.2.

At the top of this page, we’ll go to keyword filters > position > 11-20 and then click show results.

Some very important nuance here: this does not necessarily show us unique pages; it shows us the biggest keywords for which we rank on p.2 + the page that is ranking.

You’ll see some of the same pages, because each of these pages ranks for hundreds of different keywords.

But it’s still a goldmine. It allows us to see the highest potential available in our current roster of content, and if a page ranks on p.2 for a good, juicy keyword, but it also already ranks for keywords on p.1, it should make boosting those p.2 keywords even easier.

Here’s what it looks like for Beard Brand.

So, there are 267 pages that rank on p.2 for some keyword. This list filters those keywords and pages by the traffic already generated for the keywrods.

Which also means, Beard Brand already generates about 8,400 monthly organic visits from keywords on p.2.

Boosting some of these to p.1 would be a pretty drastic increase.

Usually, I’ll look at p.2 keywords about quarterly, and I’ll use those to inform a deep optimization campaign.

But it’s very, very low-hanging fruit, and it requires no extra marketing, no extra writing, and minimal optimization. It’s a massive lever.

How to actually do this for yourself

• Use Ahrefs to pull pages with keywords on p.2

• Optimize those pages for those keywords by:

  • Adding internal links with those keywords in exact-match anchors

  • Add those keywords to those pages a few times in the headings

  • Add those keywords 3-5 times in the body

  • Link out to relevant external sources using exact-match anchors

• Measure traffic increases over time

Snack: Beard Brand’s mini media empire around men’s buzz cuts

Beard Brand is an absolute beast of a brand, and I’ll do a full case study on them eventually.

But I couldn’t wait to show you this one example.

Usually, for the SNACK portion of this newsletter, I’m looking for, like, individual pieces of content that go above and beyond in some way.

But when I ended up on Beard Brand’s site, I saw they’d created almost an entire little media empire around a single topic, using a single blog post as a hub.

Super crazy. Check it out.

Look how innocuous this blog post looks:

Simple listicle. Nothing fancy. We’ve all seen these before. Here’s a quick link if you’d like to look at it yourself.

Then I started digging deeper.

First, the organic traffic to the page is incredibly strong.

This page generates 17,176 organic visits per month, or about 206,000 organic visits annually. Extremely strong.

But then I scrolled down the page and saw what else they were doing.

In addition to standard, written, listicle-style content, they were layering on hyper-personal videos from their YouTube channel that showed dudes getting buzz cuts for the first time.

The blog promotes the videos. The videos promote the blog. The views on the videos feed the YouTube algorithm. And so on.

They’ve created a feedback loop of content promoting content.

There are two videos on the page. One has been published for 2 years and has generated 1.1M views (lets call it 550k/yr). The other has been up for a year and has generated 178k views. The blog post generates 206k.

This little cluster of content generates 934,000 eyeballs for Beard Brand per year.

Thanks, in large part, to the feedback loop they created.

How to do this yourself

Not everyone has the capacity to make videos, but we could feasibly do this with any two content platforms we have at our disposal as long as they actually work.

• Take a winning piece of content

• Create content about the same topic on another platform where we already have an audience (more is better)

• Use all of the content in the cluster to promote all other content in the cluster

• Add conversion points

• Measure & adjust

Morsels: Links & headlines

Links to help you grow

• My current favorite marketing newsletter, Indexy’s newsletter (link)

• Another favorite free marketing resource, Stacked Marketer (link)

• Best newsletter for DTC specifically, Chew on this (link)

• A good writing-specific newsletter, Write On (link)

Headlines

• Research Says These Two Choices Determine Your Content’s Shelf Life (link)

• 17 Top Programmatic Advertising Platforms to Use in 2023 (link)

• Getting Started With GA4: A Practical Approach (link)

• The Future of Email Marketing: Insights From 23 Content Marketing Experts (link)

• How SEOs and UX Designers Can Work Better Together (link)

• Consumer Buying Behavior and Marketing: What Does Our Data Say?

  (link)

• How to Batch Instagram Reels Content Efficiently (link)

That’s the issue.

Go forth and conquer.

—FNCG