One Keyword
Category: Search Engine Optimization | Tags: Content Strategy, SEO, avalanche email, business ideas
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Today I’m talking about focusing on one keyword and why that focus won’t serve you well.
Stop focusing on just one specific keyword you want to rank for.
It won’t ever lead to the outcomes you are looking for.
Topic dominance is how you rank for your one keyword and you’ll only get that by focusing on more keywords and serving them well.
NerdWallet’s Dominance of “Student Loan Forgiveness”

The screenshot above shows the page 1 visibility that NerdWallet has for any keyword containing “student loan forgiveness.”
The Organic Keywords Trend shows you that it’s been on the up and up since January 2016.
In April 2016 they had 23 keywords on page one of Google, bringing in about 179 visits per month.
Today they have 797 page one keywords, bringing in about 60,600 visitors per month.
So how did they do it?
I exported all of the keywords from January 2016 and compared them to today’s keywords.
Each keyword has an associated ranking URL.
I removed all duplicate URLs to reveal that:
- In April 2016 they had 9 articles on Student Loan Forgiveness.
- Today they have 46 articles on Student Loan Forgiveness.
In 6 years they increased content on this topic by 5x (only 6 articles per year).
Yet, they increased their traffic by 33,754% (179/month to 60,600/month)
And while they continued creating content on the topic of Student Loan Forgiveness, their visibility for that specific keyword (550,000 avg monthly searches) started to increase.
Stop focusing on one big keyword and focus on dominating a topic by continually creating, editing, and organizing content for a better user experience, and your visibility will increase over time.
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