In this article, we use one Saved View to find topics that will bring us ROI, results, and rankings. We’re looking to answer questions like, “Where should I focus my efforts to get the best ROI from content investment?” or “Where should I focus my efforts to get the best results?” or “Where should I focus my efforts to get improved rankings?”
For this we need to create a Saved View in the Topics Inventory.
Use these data points
- Topic
- Top Rank
- Potential Traffic
- Difficulty
- Topic Authority
- Personalized Difficulty
- Topic Volume
- 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.
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.
Topic Authority is the difference between Difficulty and Personalized Difficulty and effectively indicates your competitive advantage.
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 Volume is the monthly search volume for the term.
Top Ranking URL is the URL of the page that ranks highest on your domain for that topic.
Sort by
- Sort by Potential Traffic descending so that topics with the greatest capacity for traffic appear at the top.
Using this view
ROI, in this particular view, refers to traffic (although you could use a different metric like Value/Mo). So you’ll want to apply a filter to Potential Traffic to limit the list to those topics with the best traffic prospects.
Topic Volume is more of an aspirational goal because you’ll never be able to capture all the traffic. However, it may be a good alternative filter as opposed to Potential Traffic.
You’ll also want to apply a filter to Top Rank to remove anything ranking in first place because you can’t do anything better than that (Best Rank is greater than 1). Alternatively, you can apply the filter (Best Rank is greater than 1 and less than 11) to focus your efforts on optimizing existing content that ranks on the first page.
Use Topic Authority in combination with Personalized Difficulty to get a better handle on how much effort is required and the likelihood of success (high Topic Authority and low Personalized Difficulty is best). You can also filter on Personalized Difficulty to remove those situations where it will be too difficult.
Customizing this view
Here are some other filtering suggestions to try, depending on your objective:
- Apply a filter to Best Rank greater than 10 and less than 31will provide a list of content that is ranking decently, but could do a much better with some optimization.
- Apply a filter to Best Rank greater than 30 to find potential issues of intent mismatch (evaluate each list item to determine whether to update or create new content).
- Apply a filter to Best Rank is not ranking to create a list of new content possibilities.