In this article, we are looking at topics where there’s intent mismatch, looking to answer the question, “What content should I create, based on topics for which we rank but there’s an intent mismatch?”
If you’ve already created a Saved View for New Content – No Coverage, you can copy that one. Then add one column (URL) and update the filters.
Otherwise, let’s set up a view for this in the Topics Inventory.
Use these data points
- Topic
- Top Rank
- Topic Volume
- Potential Traffic
- Difficulty
- Personalized Difficulty
- Topic Authority
- Top Ranking URL
Top Rank – MarketMuse looks at all pages that rank for the topic and displays the highest one. “NR” is displayed if there are no ranking pages.
Topic Volume is the monthly search volume for the term.
Potential Traffic is based on the potential rank and the topic’s search volume. Potential rank itself is calculated based on the current rank and personalized difficulty. Overall, it’s an estimation of how much traffic you could have if you were to optimize this page-topic pair.
Difficulty measures how hard it is for anyone to rank for a topic.
Personalized Difficulty evaluates how hard it is for your site to rank (lower is better).
Read What is Personalized Keyword Difficulty and Why You Need It
Topic Authority is the difference between Difficulty and Personalized Difficulty and effectively indicates your competitive advantage.
Top Ranking URL is the URL of the page that ranks highest on your domain for that topic.
Sort by
You can sort on any one of the columns such as Topic Volume, Potential Traffic, Personalized Difficulty, or Topic Authority, depending on your preference.
Using this view
This view is designed to have a filter on Top Rank > 40, giving you a shortlist of appropriate candidates by filtering out those that appear on the first three pages of the Google SERP.
You’re most likely to find intent mismatches by looking at topics for which you rank poorly. This happens when content is not properly aligned with the topic. Your page may be about one thing, for which you rank well, and also ranks poorly for a related topic which isn’t really the topic of that page.
The idea is to create a manageable shortlist of intent mismatches to investigate further.
Customizing this view
Here are a few ideas for customizing this view:
- Apply a Filter to Top Rank greater than 40 to restrict the list to poorly ranking topics.
- Apply a Filter to Top Rank less than 60 (or some appropriate upper range) to further limit the list.
- Apply a filter to Volume to limit the list to topics with decent volume
- Apply a filter to Personalized Difficulty to further shorten the list to topics that are easy to rank for you.
- Sort on Topic Authority to prioritize topics where you are most likely to succeed.
Read Working With Filters to learn how to create filters.