By Neil Patel

Blogging is a pain.

Not because content is hard to write (worse case you can just hire a writer or agency), but due to the fact that no one can guarantee that your blog post gets read or not.

Just think about it… you spend all this time writing content, but no one can guarantee that it gets seen, shared, or even linked to.

So, I thought it would be fun to analyze popular blog posts and see what common characteristics that they have.

That way you can replicate what they are doing and increase the likelihood that your post gets read.

Now for this study, we deemed a popular blog post as anything that generates at least 1,000 visitors a month from Google organic search (this was based on Ubersuggest data).

We also didn’t exclude any countries and looked at the data from a global level.

Here’s what we learned.

A popular post tends to rank for at least 38 keywords

A big thing in common was that popular blog posts rank for at least 38 keywords.

What’s interesting though is posts that generate at least 5,000 visits a month from Google rank for 51 or more keywords.

But the big difference between posts that generate at least 1,000 visitors versus 5,000 wasn’t the number of keywords that they were targeting, it was more so that they were ranking for keywords that were searched on average 984 times a month.

Now granted they didn’t get 984 clicks for each keyword that they ranked for, as no site really gets all the clicks, and there is no guarantee that they were in the number 1 spot.

When looking at this data we decided to dig in a bit more and we randomly picked 300 blog posts that generate at least 1,000 visits a month from Google to see how many keywords they mentioned on their page that contained at least 50 searches a month.

Can you guess what the number was?

Well, after we removed generic one-word terms that aren’t really considered keywords (such as how I mentioned words like “analyze, month, generate, data” within this post but I am not really targeting those keywords), the number comes out to a staggering 76 keywords.

But wait, how do you come up with 76 keywords for every blog post you write?

Before I break down how you can come up with a laundry list of keywords to include in every blog post you write, keep this in mind…

1. You should never stuff keywords in a blog post for the sake of getting SEO traffic. Your post should flow and adding the keywords should feel natural. (If you are hiring a writer, a good writer shouldn’t struggle with this.)
2. There are outliers and some blog posts generate a lot of traffic without targeting dozens of keywords within their content.
3. You shouldn’t write blog posts just for “Google traffic”. If the content doesn’t provide value to the user, it is going to hurt your website rankings in the long run as …read more

   Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog

         

   

   Author: Aaron