How To Start A Startup

How we built ContactOut to 8 figures in revenue. Video series with screen shares.

Entrepreneurship

Part 24: Keyword Research for Programmatic SEO

Rob Liu

Entrepreneurship

Part 24: Keyword Research for Programmatic SEO

Rob Liu

Let's get started on how to do programmatic SEO. We have 7 million of these pages targeting person name + email.

For example, "Elon Musk email," and in total these pages have generated over a million in traffic last month.


Here's another example from Canva, where they target templates, so you have sales templates, background templates, help templates.


Another example is Airbnb targeting vacation rentals for different countries like the United States or Philippines with thousands of these pages.


To make these pages, we start with keyword research.

A keyword consists of a modifier and a key term, for example, person name + email or in Airbnb's case, a location + vacation rental.

For these keywords, first, we want to check: does the traffic convert? We want to check the conversion rate to sign up as well as if the traffic actually buys your product.


The next thing to check is the traffic volume. ContactOut's key term "email" gets 37 million searches per month and Canva's key term "template" gets 17 million searches per month..


I use Ahrefs to check traffic volumes because it gives a more precise number than Google Keyword Tool, which you could also use since it incorporates the Google data along with clickstream data and other data sources.


Also, Google only gives you the search volumes for the keyword by itself, "email," whereas Ahrefs will give you the keyword volume for all other terms that contain your main keyword "email" in my case."