SEO Case Study: 402% More Traffic Than Forecasted

We decided to build a fully bottom-funnel strategy (targeting only searchers who were shopping around and ready to buy). The plan was to piggy back off of competitor’s branded traffic and build “alternatives” SEO competitor comparison pages.

Most of the estimated search volume in Ahrefs was low:

While the estimated search volume was 10 or less for some keywords, it brought in far more traffic:

This happened because while we optimized it for a single keyword, people have many ways to search for a single search intent. That means as long as you can correctly identify the intent, you’ll end up ranking for for more keywords than the first one:

As you can see, just one of the pieces ended up ranking for 426 keywords rather than the 1 we optimized it for. Another reason our forecast was exceeded was that Ahrefs and all other keyword research tools vastly underestimate traffic and volume.

As you can see in the above image, it says that this page received 368 monthly users. But if we look at the real data in Google Search Console, we can see that we actually received far more than that:

What’s interesting about this “alternatives to” technique is that you if your brand name doesn’t have much traction yet, you can use the traffic that your competitors get from their own brand name.

Regardless of whether you choose to write about your competitor or not, the search traffic is there, and the person shopping for it will find pages comparing your competitors. When you decide to own that keyword and create the pages yourself, you’re both:

-Making sure your brand is mentioned as a part of that conversation

-Controlling the narrative of how you’re presented and benchmarked against your competitors.