Keyword research is crucial to your success with any content site. However, sometimes you need some clever ways to find good keywords to target! The strategy in this article uses forums and Semrush to find a large number of keywords that forums are ranking on page one for.
It's pretty well known in the affiliate site business that SERPS where forums rank on page 1 are generally easy to rank for. If something like Reddit is on page one, you've got a good chance of getting there too.
There's never a guarantee of course, 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 do so, which is why this tactic is so genius.
I put the strategy to the test right away with one of my niche sites, and found as many as twenty new article ideas from it. Not bad for an hour's work.
I then published the articles over the course of the next 3 weeks (1 post per day), and did nothing 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 the very basic level.
I'll summarize the strategy below:
1.) You find forums in your niche.
2.) You put those forums into semrush.com.
3.) You find all the keywords that the forum ranks on page 1 for.
4.) You pick and choose the ones you also want to rank for.
Finding Forums In Your Niche
Depending on how well you know your niche, you may or may not already know what forums are active in the space. If you don't, the easiest thing to do is just search in Google for something like “Niche + Forum” or “Keyword + Forum”. Do a few variations and you should find a couple of forums.
Note: It's better if you can find a forum that is 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 this up, though it probably does exist). A not-so-good 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.
Putting Those Forums Into Semrush
The strategy would probably work with Ahrefs as well, since that has a similar competitor keyword data tool now too. However, I have a semrush subscription, and that's the tool I used.
If you don't want to pay for Semrush, you can still get a few ideas by using the free version, but the data you get from the paid version is well worth it. If you have the budget, it might even be worth signing up for one month, getting as much use out of it as you can, then unsubscribing.
How to use Semrush for this purpose:
1.) Enter the domain name in the top and hit search. Note, it's better to remove the http:// first.
2.) Scroll down to where it says “Organic keywords”, and hit “Full report”.
3.) Click the “Pos” button to sort keywords by position. This will show all the keywords that the forum ranks position 1 for at the top.
4.) Ideally, the forum ranks for a LOT of keywords. Find all the ones that it ranks position 1-5 for. You can look for 1-10 if you want, but I'd rather focus on the ones where the forums rank high. You can also export this data, sort it in Excel, and delete all keywords position 6 onwards.
5.) Analyze these keywords to see whether you would want to rank for them too.
Fun Fact: Hidden Keywords
A lot of the keywords that you find won't show up in normal keyword tools, so you get to find a LOT of hidden keywords. When I did it for my niche site, I found some keywords with a moderate buying intent that had thousands of searches per month.
Bonus: Look For Keywords With More Than One Forum
Some of the keywords you find will actually have two or three forums ranking in the top five. Not only are these keywords going to be insanely easy to rank for, but you'll also have found some more forums. Put them into Semrush too and repeat the process!
How Did My Experiment Go?
As I explained at the beginning of this post, before I blogged 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 were targeting about 25 keywords between them.
It's now been about 6 weeks since all posts went live and got indexed, so what positions have they ended up in?
I'm not going to share the exact keywords with you, but let's take a look at where they ended up:
The keywords all have anywhere from 50 to 2,500 searches per month. They are mostly “review” keywords (it makes sense that forums rank well for some reviews). I deliberately chose keywords that were worth ranking for. Namely, they have searches, and they have buying 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 pretty good considering that:
- No linking has been done (internal or external)
- No on page SEO has been done for the articles
- Each post is only around 500 words long.
Aside from targeting the keyword in the title and hitting the publish button, I didn't do anything else to get these results. Getting as many as two keywords to page 1 is fantastic, and the fact that more than half are on page 2 is equally great.
I've never before published 20 articles and had so many of them make positive moves.
How To Take The Next Step
Moving forward, I can start optimizing some of these pages more (put 1,000 words on the posts, add a few more keywords and meta descriptions) and then throw a few links their way too.
This is definitely a positive result and something I will be utilizing a lot more with all my sites.
Check out our keyword packs and content writing service if you want some help growing your niche site.
That’s a great tip, I’ll give it a try. It is noticeable that forums rank quite high for some keywords.
Best regards
Hey Bryon,
Good to know about SEM rush tool. I already use other keyword tools but I also try this one. Thanks for this post.
Will definitely try this. Thanks for sharing the strategy on how to find keywords!
A brilliant analysis is given on how to find keywords for forums by using semrush. The above information can be used to find the keyword for the site and blog. Thank you so much for sharing the use.
Nice read! Will definitely try semrush
I use Keyword planner and Uber suggest for keyword research now i will definitely gonna use SEMrush after reading this article.
Good job Man, I really appreciate this post!
DA used to matter right? Because the recent update from Google tells that now DA of any sites don’t matter from now.
The problem, however, is that when a niche is specified, search volume automatically decreases, resulting in lower traffic. any solution for this?
Initially you want to have a well defined niche — if you are too broad, it is really hard to rank. Much bigger competitor sites will rank for those broad topics. As your site grows, you can expand the niche into related topics to grow your traffic further. For example, a fishing site might start out focusing on the niche “Fishing lures”. Over time, you could add more clusters for “Fishing poles” and “Fishing Kayaks”.
I used Semrush for keyword research, it was very helpful.
Nice read! Will definitely try semrush
Semrush has changed its Keyword Difficulty formula (only available for chosen experts righ now, but will be roll out in a week or so) and changes are tremendous, try it and add to the article!
Semrush very good site. But more expensive
Thanks for introducing the good ways you said about the forums
This is such a good idea! I spend ages looking for keyword with forums ranking in the titles! Would you say you’d need a high DA for this to work as well as it did with your experiment?
Cheers for sharing though, It’ll save me a lot of time!
Of course the higher your DA the more effective it will be, but the point is you are finding weak competition, so it is still better than targeting other keywords.
Yeah I got the point of the strategy. I was just wondering what your sites DA was to get those results. I’ve just seen the your update of this experiment as well. Looks promising!
Hi Bryon, this is someone you know from WA (Stadium) this is a nice idea. In my niches, since I write a lot of reviews on a specific products and my competitors the same, after some time I will notice certain sites which either constantly rank below me or close. I realize you spoke of “time consuming” but what I do is “site:these sites” to see how they rank for the different keywords they use in their titles. It does tell me if they are ranking on page 1 then I have a decent shot to also rank. I have had success doing this. But you may consider this too time consuming. Which it can be, but it also interests me and also helps me come up with more KW ideas by adding words to their main KW in titles. BTW, nice site!
Great tips Stadium (and good to hear from you btw). Would doing that get the same results as semrush? If so, that’s a good alternative for people on a budget or those who can’t bring themselves to pay for Semrush. How do you find out which ones they are on page 1 for? I assume you do site:domain.com to see all their indexed articles, then you manually search for those keywords to see which ones they are ranking well for?
Yes, then I manually check where they rank. It does take time. But I think you would agree when a person has a decent understanding of their niche and KW competition in general, the person will know which keywords to check and skip checking those that are probably out of reach. So at least that would would save time.
Bryon, Once again you’ve outdone yourself. Bravo on another fantastic post. It’s like you’ve read our minds. There’s been plenty of talk about how using this method (forums in SERPs) is great, but not much on the specifics. Until now. And, another good use case for SEMRush (and maybe a group buy)