Keyword research is crucial to your success on any content site. However, sometimes you need smart ways to find good keywords to target! The strategy described in this article uses forums and Semrush to find a large number of keywords that forums are ranking on the first page for.
It is well known in the affiliate site industry that SERPS for which forums rank on page 1 are generally easy to rank for. If something like Reddit is on the first page, you have a good chance of getting there too.
There are of course never any guarantees, but experience tells me that finding these types of keywords is definitely a good thing.
The problem is: how exactly are you going to find a keyword with a forum (or two) on page 1? It would normally take an insane amount of trial and error to achieve this, which is why this tactic is so great.
I immediately tested the strategy on one of my niche sites and came up with up to twenty new article ideas. Not bad for an hour’s work.
I then published the articles over the next 3 weeks (1 post per day), and didn’t do anything with them for a few more weeks. I didn’t build any internal links to them, I didn’t build any backlinks, I didn’t even share them on social media. I wanted to see how well the strategy worked at a very basic level.
I’ll summarize the strategy below:
1.) You find forums in your niche.
2.) You put these forums in semrush.com.
3.) You find all the keywords for which the forum ranks on page 1.
4.) You choose which ones you also want to rank for.
Find forums in your niche
Depending on how well you know your niche, you may or may not already know which forums are active in the space. If not, the easiest thing to do is simply search Google for something like “Niche + Forum” or “Keyword + Forum”. Do a few variations and you should find a few forums.
Note: It’s better if you can find a forum hosted on a top-level domain rather than a subdomain. Semrush works much better when NOT used on a subdomain.
For example, a perfect forum would be something like “petsforum.com” (I made that up, although it probably exists). A bad example would be “forum.welovepets.com”.
You CAN still make it work with a subdomain forum, but the data is harder to read on Semrush.
Put these forums in Semrush
The strategy would likely also work with Ahrefs, as that now also has a similar competing keyword data tool. However, I have a Semrush subscription, and this is the tool I used.
If you don’t want to pay SemrushYou can still get some ideas using the free version, but the data you get from the paid version is worth it. If you have the budget, it might even be worth signing up for a month, getting the most out of it, and then unsubscribing.
How to use SEMrush for this purpose:
1.) Enter the domain name at the top and start searching. Note that it is best to remove the http:// first.
2.) Scroll down to where it says “Organic Keywords” and click “Full Report”.
3.) Click the “Pos” button to sort keywords by position. This will display all the keywords that the forum ranks position 1 for at the top.
4.) Ideally, the forum ranks for LOTS of keywords. Find everyone where it ranks between 1 and 5. You can search 1-10 if you want, but I prefer to focus on the ones where the forums rank well. You can also export this data, sort it in Excel and remove all keywords starting from position 6.
5.) Analyze these keywords to see if you want to rank for them as well.
Fun Fact: Hidden Keywords
Most of the keywords you find won’t show up in normal keyword tools, so you may find a LOT of hidden keywords. When I did this for my niche site, I found keywords with moderate purchase intent that were getting thousands of searches per month.
Bonus: Search multiple forums for keywords
Some of the keywords you find will actually have two or three forums ranking in the top five. Not only will these keywords be incredibly easy to rank for, but you will also have found other forums. Also put them in Semrush and repeat the process!
How was my experience?
As I explained at the beginning of this article, before blogging about the strategy myself, I wanted to try it out so I could share the results.
In total, I published 20 articles based on this strategy, which between them targeted around 25 keywords.
It’s now been about 6 weeks since all the posts were uploaded and indexed, so what positions did they end up in?
I’m not going to share the exact keywords with you, but let’s see where they ended up:
The keywords are all subject to 50 to 2,500 searches per month. Most of these are “review” keywords (it makes sense that forums rank well for some reviews). I deliberately chose keywords that were worth ranking for. Namely, they are researching and have purchase intent.
| Keyword | Position |
|---|---|
| 1 | 17 |
| 2 | 8 |
| 3 | 20 |
| 4 | 13 |
| 5 | 17 |
| 6 | 21 |
| 7 | 24 |
| 8 | 18 |
| 9 | 22 |
| 10 | 17 |
| 11 | 19 |
| 12 | 21 |
| 13 | 18 |
| 14 | 16 |
| 15 | 16 |
| 16 | 25 |
| 17 | 21 |
| 18 | 27 |
| 19 | 32 |
| 20 | 27 |
| 21 | 7 |
As you can see, the results are quite good given that:
- No link has been made (internal or external)
- No on-page referencing has been done for the articles
- Each article is only around 500 words.
Other than targeting the keyword in the title and hitting the publish button, I didn’t do anything else to get these results. Getting up to two keywords on page 1 is fantastic, and the fact that more than half are on page 2 is equally great.
I’ve never published 20 articles before and seen so many making positive gestures.
How to take the next step
In the future, I may start optimizing some of these pages more (put 1000 words on articles, add a few more keywords and meta descriptions), and then throw some links at them as well.
This is definitely a positive outcome and something I will be using a lot more of with all of my sites.
Check out our keyword packs And content writing service if you need help growing your niche site.
