The Power Page Plan

So you’ve created an article using MarketMuse and it’s ranking for all sorts of search terms. You’re happy that it’s doing so well. But still you have questions.

Is it really a good thing that the page is ranking for so many terms?

Is my page competing against other pages on my site?

Fear not my friends for this is a wonderful situation. You see, the most amazing thing you can do is write an article that ranks for dozens, if not hundreds of search terms. And in my dreams they would all rank number one.

But realistically some of them will rank on the first page, some on the second, yet more on the third page or worse.

This is a cause for celebration. In fact, I’m going to show you how to take this situation and make it even better.

When a Page Ranks for Multiple Keywords

First, let me explain what is going on here. A well-written authoritative page will rank for many related keywords and that’s a good sign! This happens because you’ve addressed the main subject of your article in a comprehensive way, covering all those important sub-topics.

All those additional ranking terms contribute to additional traffic to that page. Which is one of the reasons we encourage content strategists not to obsess over keyword search volume. We’ve written about this numerous times over the years.

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What is the Power Page Plan?

Sometimes a page is so powerful that it ranks for related terms even if they don’t quite match the intent. Typically these will be terms where your page ranks in the SERPs on the second, third, fourth page or worse.

Sometimes, you can just update that power page and expand the content with additional information to address that poorly performing related term. Other times it makes more editorial sense to create a whole new page. This in itself can form the basis of a decent content strategy as you’re working off of the strength of that well-performing page.

Here’s how it’s done.

Finding High Authority Pages

The fastest method for finding the right candidates is to use the Highest Page Authority view in MarketMuse Pages Inventory. It’s a template that’s already set up in the platform.

The view includes a number of metrics that you can use to prioritize your efforts. You can further customize the view by configuring the table to show fewer or additional metrics.  Adding a filter is another way to customize the view and can help create a shortlist if your site has many powerful pages.

We’ll just use the defaults associated with this view and sort by Page Authority so the most powerful pages appear at the top of the list.

Investigating Potential Topics

Looking at the first row, we see that our homepage has the highest authority and covers a large number of related topics. While this view also shows us other high-level metrics about the page, let’s click on the row to see details on the topics it ranks for and how they’re performing.

Generally, we’re looking for terms with a rank of 20+, they’re on the second page (or worse) of the SERP results. The home page ranks for a variety of topics and here’s one that caught my attention, “ai keyword analysis.” Let’s see what we can learn.

I know our home page well enough to say that it’s not about the topic of “ai keyword analysis.” Even if I didn’t know the page I wouldn’t even need to look at it. The content score of 6/33 (6 being our current score and 33 the target) tells me that we’re missing coverage of a lot of topics.

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The low Personalized Difficulty combined with a significant Competitive Advantage indicates that not much work is required content-wise to be successful in ranking for this topic.

The best way to look at Personalized Difficulty is in terms of the ranges or bands.

• Below 20 — optimize the existing page (assuming the topic matches what the page is about). Otherwise create a new page.
• 20 to 35 — optimize the page as above and create/optimize a page or two of supporting content.
• 35 to 50 — optimize the page as above and build out/optimize your existing cluster.
• 50 plus — most likely you don’t have a cluster so you’ll need to build out this foundation.

But here’s the thing. I don’t want to turn our home page into a page about “ai keyword analysis” because our platform does so much more.

Creating the Plan

So, we have an okay ranking for a term that interests us but we don’t want to update that page. What do we do?

We’re going to create a new page specifically focusing on that topic. Ideally we should link to it from our power page as well.

But what if the Content Score was close to the Target Content Score and the intent of the search term matched the page? In that case, it would make sense to update the page to add coverage targeting that term – “ai keyword analysis.”

If you find that the list of highest authority pages is too long, consider adding a filter to Page Authority to create a short list of candidates.

Takeaway

High authority pages are a wonderful source of low-hanging fruit. They’re ideal for building out additional content as you’re working from a position of strength. Take a close look at these pages on your site and you’ll find that they rank for a number of terms which may not quite align with the existing content.

They’re ranking, maybe not as high as you’d like, because of the authority of both your site and page. With a little work, you could rank higher for these terms. If it’s editorially feasible, update the page to cover the topic. If not, build out a new page making sure to include a link from the old one.