Keyword research is critical to your success with any content site. However, sometimes you need some smart ways to find good keywords to target! The strategy in this article uses forums and Semrush to find a large number of keywords for which forums rank on the first page.
It’s pretty well known in the affiliate site business that SERPS where forums are on page 1 usually rank easily. If something like Reddit is on the front page, there’s a good chance you’ll get there too.
Of course, there are never guarantees, but experience tells me that finding these kinds of keywords is definitely a good thing.
The problem is, how do you get a keyword with a forum (or two) on page 1? It normally takes an incredible amount of trial and error to do this, which is why this tactic is so genius.
I immediately tested the strategy with one of my niche sites and came up with ten to twenty new article ideas. Not bad for an hour’s work.
Then I posted the articles for the next 3 weeks (1 post a day) and didn’t do anything with them for another few weeks. I didn’t do any internal linking to them, didn’t do any backlinking, didn’t even share on social media. I wanted to see how well the strategy worked at its most basic level.
I will summarize the strategy below:
1.) You find forums in your niche.
2.) You enter those forums semrush.com.
3.) You find all the keywords that the forum has on page 1.
4.) You also pick and choose what you want to rank.
Find Forums in Your Niche
Depending on how well you know your niche, you may or may not know which forums are active in your niche. If you don’t, the easiest thing to do is to Google something like “Niche + Forum” or “Keyword + Forum”. Do a few variations and you should find a few forums.
Note: It’s best if you can find a forum hosted on a Top-Level-Domain and not a subdomain. Semrush works best 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 not-so-good example would be “forum.welovepets.com”.
You can still run it with a subdomain forum, but it’s harder to read the data in Semrush.
Posting these Forums to Semrusha
The strategy will likely work with Ahrefs as well, as it now has a similar competitor keyword data tool. However, I have a semrush subscription and this is the tool I use.
If you don’t want to pay Semrushyou can still get a few ideas using the free version, but the information you get from the paid version is worth it. If you’re on a budget, it might even be worth signing up for a month, getting the most out of it, then canceling.
How to use Semrush for this purpose:
1.) Enter the domain name above and click the search button. Note that it is better to remove http:// first.
2.) Scroll to where it says “Organic Keywords” and click “Full Report”.
3.) Click the “Pos” button to sort keywords by position. This will show all the keywords for which the forum ranks 1st.
4.) Ideally, the forum ranks for multiple keywords. Find all those in positions 1-5. You can search 1-10 if you want, but I’d rather focus on the top ranked forums. You can also export this data, sort it in Excel and remove all keywords after position 6.
5.) Analyze these keywords to see if you would like to rank for them.
Fun Fact: Secret Keywords
Many of the keywords you find won’t show up in normal keyword tools, so you’ll find a lot of hidden keywords. When I did this for my niche site, I found some keywords with an average purchase intent that generated thousands of searches per month.
Bonus: Search Keywords with Multiple Forums
Some of the keywords you find will actually have two or three forums in the top five. Not only will these keywords be easier to rank for, but you’ll also find more forums. Put them in Semrush too and repeat the process!
How was my experience?
As I explained at the beginning of this post, before I blog about the strategy myself, I wanted to try it out to share the results.
In total, I published 20 articles based on this strategy, among which I targeted about 25 keywords.
It’s been about 6 weeks since all the posts were live and indexed, so where have they been?
I’m not going to share the exact keywords with you, but let’s take a look at where they end up:
All keywords have 50 to 2500 searches per month. They are mostly “review” keywords (it makes sense that forums are a good place for some reviews). I deliberately chose keywords worth ranking for. That is, they have searches and purchase intentions.
| 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:
- No connection established (internal or external)
- No on-page SEO for articles
- Each post is limited to 500 words.
Other than targeting the keyword in the title and hitting publish, I didn’t do anything else to get these results. Getting twice as many keywords on page 1 is fantastic, and having more than half on page 2 is equally great.
I have never published 20 articles before and most of them were positive steps.
How to take the next step
Going forward, I might start optimizing some of these pages more (put 1000 words on the posts, add a few more keywords and meta descriptions) and then throw some links their way.
This is definitely a positive result and something I will use more on all my sites.
Check out our keyword packs and content writing service if you want help growing your niche site.
