Why You Should Love Data Driven SEO


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What is data driven SEO? If done correctly, data-driven SEO can offer an incredible way to drive high-quality traffic to your site, without having to continually publish super high-quality content month after month.

Simply, data driven SEO is the process of finding a set of keywords with decent search volume that apply to a big number of things.  For example, the terms "homes for sale" and "real estate" each have massive search volume.

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keyword overview in Ahrefs for "homes for sale"

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keyword overview in Ahrefs for "homes for sale"

As you can see, both keywords bring insanely high keyword difficulties with them.  Good luck ranking for them.

Back to that "apply to a big number of things" idea. Do you know what the US has lots of?  Cities. Towns.  Zip codes.  Plugging in a few cities into Ahrefs shows that when you add a city onto the "homes for sale" keyword, you get keywords with a good amount of search volume that have much less competition.  This is a good thing!

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keyword overview in Ahrefs for "{city name} homes for sale"

When you look at where sites like Zillow, Realtor.com, or Redfin get their traffic, you'll notice the bulk of their traffic comes to not their homepage, but to pages like their city results pages.  In an aggregate, these pages bring in a massive amount of traffic.

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Redfin top pages - filled with city results

 

Here's a personal example.  A few years back I found myself exploring bank terms, and noticed "{bank name} deposit slips" terms carried a solid amount of search traffic and not a lot of competition.  That led me to start up CheckDeposit.io, a site that lets users create check deposit slips.  The crazy thing is that often our deposit slip pages outranked the bank's results in Google, even though CheckDeposit.io's domain rating is nowhere near the banks.  That initial ranking burst subsided, but now we often rank #2, right behind the bank.  Here's an example where our CIT deposit slip page ranks #2.

 

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CheckDeposit.io ranking 2nd behind CIT Bank's page

This same concept applies across a number of bank terms, notably "{bank} login", "{bank} customer support", and "{bank} notary" (e.g. "td bank notary", "citizens bank notary", and "regions bank notary").  Here's a quick glance at the top pages from CheckDeposit.io - they're all data driven SEO pages.  They all answer the searchers' questions with solid content, but they use data applied across banks to do so, versus separately written articles to do the same thing.

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top pages from CheckDeposit.io

Conclusion

If you operate in a space where you can find valuable terms that can apply across a large number of things (e.g. cities, banks, companies, etc.) then give data-driven SEO a look.  A bit of effort can lead to big traffic.