There were several things we did to get these pages to rank so fast:
1. Focus on the lowest volume keywords
This the most important part of the strategy. The higher the keyword volume reported on Ahrefs, the longer the pages took to rank (and the less traffic it actually brought us).
For example, “looker vs tableau” had the highest reported search volume on Ahrefs, but brought us the least amount of traffic compared to the other pages:
It’s not that the search volume wasn’t there—it’s just the the higher the reported volume is, the more people go for that keyword, and the harder it is to get in the top 3. This page was one of the slowest to rank, hence the disapointing keyword volume.
By focusing on the lowest-volume keywords, we ended up still getting thousands new users per month.
2. Internal linking strategy
No page published was left an orphan. As we do with every client, every time we publish a page we go back into old pages and add links back to the new page. Specifically, we find pages that are already ranking well and frequently crawled by Google, and add the links there.
3. Manually submit page to GSC
As soon as each page was published, we manually submitted the URL to Google Search Console in the hopes that it would speed up the indexing process.
4. External link building
Once a page started ranking and being picked up by Google, we built external links to it to drive growth faster.