Get 100,000+ people to read your content (and love it)

Easy keyword research for solopreneurs.

How would you like to:

• Attract an audience without begging it to subscribe on social media

• Have super on-point content ideas that make people trust you

• Get traffic of 100,000+ people (even if only 5% subscribe to your newsletter, it’ll be a hit)

That’s what SEO wizards can do.

They play at a higher level than just platform-knowledge.

They work with the biggest platform—Google—and use it to grow their business.

And I promise you, it’s not even that hard. After all, we don’t want to become SEO experts. We just want to have one more way of growing our business.

Today,

Alberto Cabas Vidani

, author of

The Unstoppable Creator

, is showing us how to do just that, starting with the basic (and crucial for success): keyword research & implementation.

Alberto Cabas Vidani

Keyword research: the smart minimalist guide.

Solopreneurship is a journey into uncertainty. Everything that reduces this uncertainty is a blessing. SEO is one of these things.

My first site peaked at 300,000 organic page views a month, all from Google. I knew I could rely on a constant (and passive) traffic stream to fuel my email list and my sales. 

Today SEO is harder, but it still works. 

Here's an essential guide to ranking your articles on Google and attracting evergreen traffic.

Why optimize your articles?

Google wants to serve useful pages to users, and the most useful pages are those that answer questions, aka articles.

But most importantly, helpful articles build trust:

• a reader asks a question to Google,

• finds your article,

• your helpful answer builds trust, so she subscribes to your email list,

• over time, you send her more content and build more trust,

• she buys from your emails.

Do you need a website to do SEO? 

SEO experts say yes. Ideally, get a basic WordPress website. This way, you’re driving traffic into your own platform, and building next-level brand & credibility. Plus, you have more ways to do high-level SEO optimization. 

However, if you’re not there yet, you can still optimize your Medium or Substack posts for SEO to get more traffic & attract an audience outside the readers of these platforms. 

Keep in mind that this would require a mixed approach. Since Medium’s articles are behind a paywall (so not just any Google user can read them), and Substack posts serve a different purpose, you will need to designate specific SEO-focused articles, optimize them and make them free so you can take full advantage of the traffic you’ll get. 

Don’t forget to put a link to your e-mail list in those. 

Keyword research

What you need

Not a lot. 

1. You need a keyword research tool. The good ones are all paid. Ubersuggest has all the basic tools you need and an affordable lifetime plan. If you want the best results, go for Ahrefs. It’s expensive, so subscribe for one month, research your niche, then cancel. 

2. Google Sheets to save the research results.

Generate seed keywords

We are trying to rank articles that solve problems or answer questions. For example, in the fitness niche, typical questions could be:

• how do I lose 10 kg in a month?

• How do I do push-ups correctly?

• What is a mobility workout plan I can do in 15 minutes a day?

The answers to similar questions are your articles. So, first, you need a long list of these questions, at least 50, written like Google search queries.

We call these seed keywords because we’ll use them to generate more keywords.

How do you come up with at least 50 seed keywords?

• If you are part of your audience, remember the doubts, problems, curiosities, and aspirations you had in the beginning (beginners are the largest portion of your audience).

• Look at your competitors, focusing particularly on their most successful content. Social media or YouTube are particularly helpful, because views, likes, comments, and shares are visible.

• Take advantage of communities, such as Facebook groups. Find the most discussed and most frequently recurring questions. Engage to learn more about how the audience thinks.

• Scan through the tables of contents of books and courses. Chapters and subchapters are often ideas for articles.

Generate and evaluate keywords

Now that you have your seed keywords, you can use them to generate more keywords. And while you generate them, you can also find the best ones.

The smartest way to rank your articles isn’t to hunt for the next hack ignored by the competition. It’s too just avoid the competition.

This means using keywords with low competition and relatively high volume. Here’s the process.

(I’ll show you how to do it in Ubersuggest. Every keyword research tool has similar features.)

So, go to the Keyword Ideas section and add 1-3 keywords. You’ll get something like this:

The tool generated hundreds of keywords, as you can see in the SUGGESTIONS tab (right under Keyword Ideas). 

How do you find the best ones? 

First, consider the search intent. The search intent tells you why a reader searches for a keyword. As a solopreneur, you need only one big differentiation: people who are looking to buy something and people who are looking for everything else.

For example, when someone searches for “customized meal plan”, they might be interested in purchasing a service. When they search for “meal plan download”, instead, they might want a free PDF or a low-cost product at most.

What is the purpose of this distinction? The intent tells how to choose good keywords:

• For keywords with a purchasing intent, you can settle for a low search volume, 100 searches per month are enough. You will only need a few visits each month to get positive ROI.

• All other keywords need a higher search volume, at least 1000 searches per month, and low difficulty.

Knowing this, look into search volume + difficulty (which indicates competition). 

In the screenshot above, “how to do a pushup” has a great volume: 8100 searches per month–but it’s high difficulty (71, red). Trying to rank for it would be a bloodbath. 

“How to do more push-ups” has far lower volume, but it’s still good, and the difficulty is low (21, green).

When you find a keyword like this, you have the idea for an article. Add it to a spreadsheet.

Repeat this process for all the seed keywords. It’s tedious, but you don’t have to do it often. With a few hours of work, you’ll have enough ideas for a year's worth of articles.

On-page SEO

Now that you have a long list of high-potential keyword, you need to create an optimized article based on them. Here’s an evergreen checklist.

Insert the main keyword in the right places

To tell Google what your article is about, include the keyword in:

• the title,

• the URL,

• the first hundred words,

• the meta description (only available for editing if you have a website with the YOAST and All In One SEO plugins. 

• some of the headings,

• the article body (multiple times).

Don’t go oberboard. Years ago, SEO experts practiced keyword stuffing. They repeated the keyword an annoying number of times to improve their articles ranking. Now, Google penalizes it.

If it sounds like too much, it probably is.

During the keyword generation phase, you’ve also probably found related keywords. For example, searching for “magnesium supplements”, you may find “magnesium supplements benefits” and “magnesium supplement dosage”.

In the past, many sites published an article for each of these related keywords. Nowadays, it's better to consolidate all this information in a single article. Unless the related keywords alone requires a 1500-word article.

Finally, insert both internal and external links. The former link to pages within your site, the latter linke to other sites.

The results

Bringing in traffic is among the top goals of any solopreneur. By doing keyword research right and implementing it into your SEO-focused posts, you can get 100,000+ people to your work, boost your e-mail subscribers and take your business to a whole new level.