How I judge SEO opportunity

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

SEO is one of the more annoying kinds of content marketing, mostly because it’s so tough to predict what in the blue hell “winning” even looks like. Usually just feels like you’re flying blind. Today, I’m going to show you how I assess SEO opportunity in any niche so YOU won’t have to fly blind.

• Appetizers: Links from Marketo, Hubspot, Ahrefs, and more…

• Main Course: How I judge SEO opportunity in literally any niche

Let’s dig in.

Appetizers: Content about content 🤯

• Five Common SEO Mistakes That Content Marketers Make (link)

• 20 Successful Blogs And Their Latest 2023 Revenue Numbers (link)

• The State of Content SERPs: A 250,000 Keyword Analysis (link)

• Every Copywriting Formula Ever (link)

• The Content Brand Framework: How to Differentiate Your Company with Content (link)

Main Course: How I judge the SEO opportunity for literally any market

This is something I used to do before every sales call at the agency. 

The morning of a sales call (or calls in most cases), and research my potential clients, and the very first question I’d try to answer was…

…How big is the SEO opportunity? 

It was a vitally important question. We were a content agency, and, while we did all kinds of content marketing, SEO was the bulk of our product offering. 

And while every business can usually use SEO to some degree, it’s usually most efficient to hire an agency (and ours was a bit expensive) when the opportunity is relatively juicy.

So, I dialed in a research process to figure out exactly how big the SEO opportunity was, so I could then come to the sales call and talk about the actual upside. 

It made sales conversations a lot more productive, of course.

But after doing it for a while, I also started to be really pretty accurate with how well I could predict the opportunity. 

When I predicted the opportunity was big, turned out that way more often than not.

When I predicted it was small, it usually was. 

I was SEO-stradomus (please forgive this atrocious pun; couldn’t resist).

Ok cool.

But why does this matter for you? 

First, being able to understand what (and where) your SEO opportunity really is will drastically – and I mean drastically – improve the quality of your content strategy. 

If you know what the upside looks like, it’s much easier to allocate resources – to answer those finicky questions about budget and people. 

It’s also much, much easier to figure out your pie chart, answering the question: How much of my strategy should be SEO instead of other stuff? 

And lastly, because of how I like to do this research, at the end, you’ll end up with targets you can reverse-engineer, which will also make your strategy a lot easier, and it’ll boost your odds of success. 

Let me walk you through it step-by-step. 

If you just want to see a video of me actually doing this, I recorded a quick video that you can watch here:

My video walkthrough of this process.

Part #1: Evaluate TOFU SEO opportunity by reverse-engineering people with the biggest audiences.

TOFU = top of funnel. 

TOFU content is a very specific type of content. 

When we’re thinking about the top of the funnel, we’re much more worried about eyeballs than we are about conversions.

Yes, of course, we’re eventually worried about conversion.

But that’s not the top of the funnel’s job. 

The top of the funnel’s job is to get people into the building. 

THEN we can try to either sell them stuff or get them into our system via tactics like “conversation stacking” (read the post I wrote about that here).

We can pixel them so our ads are cheaper. We can get them on email lists. We can boost the value of our brand. And so on.

TOFU is about building an audience. 

And we do that with large volumes of traffic. 

So, when we’re trying to assess TOFU opportunities, we’re mostly asking the question: How can I attract as many relevant people to our content as humanly possible, and what is that ceiling? 

This is how we find that ceiling.

In general, we find the upper limit of what SEO can do in any given niche by finding the competitors who have the biggest audiences. 

To do that, we need two tools: Google and Ahrefs (or a similar SEO intelligence tool, but I recommend Ahrefs).

These are the basic steps.

1. Use Google to find blogs and news publications in a space (e.g. cybersecurity blogs)

Literally, just google stuff like “running blog” or “cyber security blog”. If you already know of a massive blog in your space, you can use that as a jumping off point.

2. Plug blogs into Ahrefs until you find one with lots of traffic. 

“Lots” is going to be relative to your industry. If you’re in the beauty industry, you’re going to find huge amounts of blogs with massive traffic. 

If you sell cryogenic metallurgy (shout out to my worst ever client), you probably won’t find as many. 

If you’re in a super-specific industry, use the websites of trade magazines instead. For example, even in something as wonky as cryogenic metallurgy, the trade magazines will almost always have traffic – i.e., The Cryogenic Society website generates about 20,000 visits/mo. 

Here’s a screenshot of a good example from a search on cybersecurity. 

3. Use Ahrefs “Top Pages” report to verify that the sites have a large variety of TOFU content. 

Some sites that look like they have tons of traffic will actually have a bunch of branded traffic (people searching for their brand). 

Other sites will have traffic that goes to product pages.

We want TOFU content, so when we use the “Top Pages” report in Ahrefs, we’re looking for a bunch of blog-type pages getting meaningful traffic.

Here’s a screenshot of an example of one of those reports.

4. Use Ahrefs’ competitor tools to find organic competitors of the sites you found. 

This is how you expand your list. 

Ahref’s competitor tools will help you leverage their massive data warehouse to find websites you likely wouldn’t have found on your own. 

Here’s  a screenshot of what that looks like.

5. The biggest one you find is likely your approximate probable ceiling, but you can reverse engineer everything you looked at to have a shot at an even bigger audience.

The traffic of the biggest site you found is usually what I think of as the “ceiling” for TOFU SEO opportunity. 

BUT…

You can reverse-engineer everything you looked at for keywords, content, ideas, etc. 

In fact, as you’re creating a content strategy, you should reverse-engineer every website you can find using this method to come up with the most possible data.

And businesses with truly deep pockets can sometimes break through SEO ceilings if they reverse-engineer not just one competitor – but many competitors, and compete with the market in aggregate. 

Takes some serious budget, though.  

Step #2: Find BOFU SEO opportunity by looking at the SERPs for the most targeted keywords.

Understanding the opportunity at the bottom of the funnel is usually considerably easier. 

We’re generally only looking at traffic that’s likely to land on product pages (or other content super close to the bottom of the funnel, although most businesses won’t have much). 

And then, we’re looking at the SERPs (i.e., Google results) to see how the best pages perform. 

1. Use Ahrefs’ Keyword Tool to look at the most common-sense keywords for our most BOFU pages.

We don’t need to be fancy. And we almost always know what those are. And if not, we can still get there with just a bit of intuition. 

For example, if we sell red running shoes, we’d just look up the keyword “red running” shoes. 

There might be some variations and stuff, but we don’t need to worry about that, because whoever’s winning for “red running shoes” is likely winning for most of those other variations as well.

Screenshot for ya.

2. Look at the estimated traffic for the top pages.

Now, we want to look at the estimated traffic for the top pages.

But not necessarily all of them: we want to look at pages that are most like our own and/or are selling super similar products. 

It’s also good to look at their referring domains (“Domains” in the keyword report, which is the number of websites linking to this page) & keywords.

The number of referring domains will give you an idea of how many links you might need to compete for the same traffic.

And the number of keywords the top pages rank for can give you a good idea of how large the total topic is in Google.

Same screenshot with this data highlighted.

3. Repeat for all product pages and/or all BOFU pages.

Unless you’re an e-commerce store, most businesses will have a handful of product pages.

So you can do this manually and just add up the traffic of the top pages for the primary keywords for your products to assess what the opportunity is. 

Quick caveats…

First, If you are an e-commerce store, just follow the steps in Part 1, but look at similar e-commerce stores instead of blogs.

Second, we’re trying to find total opportunity here. Don’t dig yourself into a hole by making promises against it. Usually, I’ll try to assess total opportunity, and try to capture 20%-30% of that audience over the course of 1-2 years (unless I have massive budget to play with). 

Summary of how to assess SEO opportunity:

TOFU opportunity

• Find the biggest blogs or news sites you can

• Use Ahrefs to find other organic competitors

• The biggest one is your ceiling

• But reverse-engineer everything you find for content ideas

BOFU opportunity

• Look at the SERPs for keywords closest to your products

• Look at the page with the top estimated traffic (your ceiling)

• Add this up for all product pages

Then, record the total opportunity, and try to go get like 20%-30% of it over the course of 12-18 months.

That’s the issue. If you missed last week’s issue, you can read it here.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin