Case Study: SEO for Trending Topics

8 Jan 2023 — 3 min read

This photo was generated by Text to Image AI tool in Canva

I'll talk about the ChatGPT post I created and and how it performed well given that my website is new (launched in August/Sept) and I didn't start adding much content consistently... To date I've only published 15 blogs.

So everyone was talking about ChatGPT and I got excited and tested out myself. I decided to write a blog post about it.

Was this valuable from an SEO standpoint?

From a pure SEO standpoint, if we follow the traditional process, and go investigate if this is a topic worth writing about, SEO tools like SEMrush will show you it has no value. This is the data for "chatgpt" keyword in SEMRush, and the data is for January!

All meanwhile, the data in Google trends shows a different story

The Launch

I created the post, and sent it to my newsletter subscribers. It was one of the earlies blog posts about ChatGPT and SEO. Here are some facts & insights about how this post performed:

I created the post on Dec 5th, the post was indexed and started getting impressions on that same day.

Post starting to see impressions from search Dec 5th

Same day indexing is possible! The post got indexed and starting ranking same day. If I compare this to the last post I published, which took 2 days to start getting impressions in search (still relatively fast, maybe I should explain why in another post), the ChatGPT post definitely got indexed very quickly. This may mean that Google gives new and trending topics more precedence in getting indexed.
Is domain authority or domain score important? Your "domain authority" which is a vanity metric has nothing to do with how fast your website gets indexed in search. My website has an authority score of 4 on SEMRush

Are zero search volume keywords valuable? If you compare the total number of impressions for Chatgpt related keywords in GSC and the search volume for all keywords in SEMRush magic tool search for Chatgpt, you'll see that third party tools have limitations when it comes to estimating search volume. So the answer is yes, zero search volume keywords is valuable.

Over 3000 impressions for chatgpt blop posts since launch

No data for chatgpt keywords in SEMRush magic tool

Wins/Results

Here are the results of the post that took 1-2 hours to write (at most):

99 organic clicks in 1 month and over 3k impressions
Page 1 ranking for "how to use Chatgpt for SEO"

12 newsletter signups
1 quality backlink
Over 600 views (in 1 month) and ~500 people visited the post.

Yes, definitely. Sometimes they are easy to rank for and therefore can attract backlinks too. Even if those trending topics are not middle/bottom of funnel for your business, targeting them can help you build authority pages, that you can use to link internally to important pages to give them a push in SERPs (internal links are backlinks too!) and improve your overall website trustworthiness for Google.

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