What if I told you that you could
rank on the first page of Google search results for thousands of
keywords? My guess is that you’d first ask how much it was going to cost you.
The answer is…not that much.
The more material you give Google
to index, the better you’ll be able to rank for keywords. But you need to go
beyond the 1,890-word
blog post thinking. That’s where power pages come in.
The term “power page” was first
coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko.
A power page is a page that is strategically designed to rank on page 1 of
Google. There are three important aspects that go into a power page:
Length: Power pages take
long-form to the extreme. They should be well above the standard 2,000-word
blog post everyone is doing. Think more like 4,000 words or even as high as
10,000-20,000 words, like an “ultimate guide” on one topic.
Navigation: Power pages should be
easy to navigate, with content broken into chapters, a table of contents with
anchor links, or just an easy-to-scan layout with headers and plenty of visual
assets.
Audience: Power pages aren’t for
your potential customers; they’re for the influencers in your industry. You
want those people to link to and share your page, helping to boost your
backlinks and reach. Therefore, power pages shouldn’t be written at a 101 or
basic level. They should be comprehensive and contain valuable information for
an intermediate or expert reader.
Power pages are not intended for
selling – they should just exist to provide in-depth information and create
value. Anything more than a button at the bottom that takes the user to a
landing page is too heavy-handed for this type of content. The idea is to show
your expertise, which will lead to social shares, increased traffic and,
ultimately, qualified leads.
Since I mentioned Brian Dean,
I’ll use one of his posts as an example. Link Building for SEO: The Definitive The guide is a great power page:
It comes in at more than
4,500 words, and it’s easy to navigate via chapters:
And it comes up on the first page
of Google for both “link building for SEO” and “link building”:
Some stats on Brian Dean’s
power page:
It has more than 10,000 social
shares
It has more than 900 backlinks
It ranks for 788 keywords
Now, I know I said “thousands of
keywords,” but 788 is still pretty amazing. Also, Brian Dean is an SEO master,
so you know those keywords are the good ones.
Here’s another one: Google
AdWords Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide:
This monster piece of content has
more than 10,000 words and ranks for more than 2,000 keywords. And if you
search “Google AdWords,” it comes up on the first page. That’s no small feat
considering that three of the first page results actually belong to Google.
Finally, here’s an example of one
we did a while back and recently updated: How to Create the Ultimate
Marketing Funnel:
This is the third most popular
page on Single Grain’s website. It’s more than 5,000 words long and ranks for
hundreds of keywords on its own.
What do all of these power pages
have in common? They’re the ultimate or definitive guides to a specific topic.
If you’re searching for information on marketing funnels, are you more likely
to click on something that says “How to Create a Marketing Funnel” or “How to create the Ultimate Marketing Funnel?” If you’re a beginner, you might go
either way. But if you’re an influencer? You already know how to create a
marketing funnel, but maybe not the ultimate one.
Power pages can go beyond guides,
though. You could also do expanded list posts (“101 Tips for Building the Best The webinar,” “30 Marketing Conferences You Need to Attend in 2020,” etc.) or
industry round-ups (“How 45 Agency CEOs Spend their Mornings,” “50 Marketing
Experts Share the Best Advice They’ve Ever Gotten,” etc.). The list goes on and
on. Just make sure it’s authoritative, will appeal to influencers and also has
value for your target customers.
Power pages promise to be the
most informative, most in-depth resource on a given topic. And the ones that
deliver get rewarded with higher Google rankings.
Why Power Pages Work
Power pages rely on simple math:
the more words on your page, the more keywords – especially long-tail
keywords – your page will rank for.
Longer content also gets more social
shares. A study by OkDork and BuzzSumo found that content
between 3,000 and 10,00 words received an average of 8,859 shares:
Another benefit of longer pages
is increased dwell time – the time a user spends on your page. There may be SEO
benefits to having people on your site longer, but this only works if your
content is engaging enough to get them to stick around.
How to Create Power Pages
Power pages aren’t for someone
who just started a blog yesterday. You have to know what content works, and if
you don’t have any content, you won’t know that. Yet. Here’s the
step-by-step process for creating content that ranks for hundreds and even
thousands of keywords on Google:
Step 1: Start with Your most
Popular Pages
Pull up your website analytics
tool and look at your most popular pages. Is there something in there that you
can expand to 4,000 words or more? Are there a few long-form articles in your
top 25 on the same topic that you could combine into one monster guide? Your
highly trafficked pages are the ones where you’ll see the biggest impact of
creating a power page.
For example, let’s say you sell
video conferencing software and you’ve written these three articles, each at
around 1,500 words:
Video Conferencing for Beginners
How to Get the Most Out of Your
Next Video Conference
Advanced Video Conferencing Tips
With just a little extra work,
you might be able to combine all three into an “Ultimate Guide to Video
Conferencing” power page.
If you don’t have popular pages
yet, create some. Make a list of keywords (see step 2) and hire some
freelancers to pump out 800- to 1,500-word articles on them. Then watch
your analytics to see what works and what doesn’t. After a few months, you
should have a good idea of what’s popular, and then you can decide which articles
could be turned into power pages.
In fact, I have a friend who took
his traffic from about a hundred thousand visits a month to over a million
visits a month, which is pretty good. He did it by hiring people to write basic
content – roughly 30 pieces per month. Then he’d spend the next 60-90 days
analyzing which ones actually worked. Those were the ones that got the power
page treatment.
Step 2: Make a List of Keywords
Once you’ve identified your most
popular pages, plug them into a keyword tool like Ahrefs, SEMrush or Ubersuggest (see
below image) and get both the main keywords they rank for as well as the
long-tail variations of those terms:
An important note: Make sure the
keywords are actually driving traffic. It’s not enough to just rank for
thousands of keywords. If those keywords aren’t driving traffic back to your
website, they’re useless.
The last thing you want to do is
spend, time, energy and money creating a power page that doesn’t bring you any
pageviews or leads. Take it from someone who’s done it. I’ve tried to revamp
mediocre content that ranked for a decent amount of keywords, and the results
have been hit-or-miss. Learn from my failed experiments.
Step 3: Upgrade Your Content
Once you have all your keywords
and long-tail phrases, it’s time to create your power page. It’s not enough to
just pepper the words and phrases throughout the content – you really need to
ensure that they related directly to your content and work within the context.
Going back to the video
conferencing company example, let’s say “video conferencing equipment” is a the long-tail keyword you want to rank for. Instead of just mentioning equipment a
few times in your guide, add a chapter called “Video Conferencing Equipment”
and write an overview of the hardware you need to conduct a successful video
conference.
If you feel like you have a good
handle on a topic for a power page, you can also hire someone to write for
you. Bill Widner is a content marketing and SEO expert who
specializes in writing power pages as a service:
Whomever you hire, make sure they
understand SEO and have experience with power pages. And expect to pay a bit
more for that expertise – $.01/word will get you exactly what you pay for!
You need to focus on more than
just words when it comes to power pages, though – they need to be visually
appealing as well. At the very least, you’ll need someone to create some simple
graphics to accompany the text. If you really want to create something special,
consider getting a developer to build a page where you can showcase a table of
contents, chapters and include some charts and graphics.
If you plan on creating power
pages on an ongoing basis, working hand-in-hand with a designer and developer
to create templates will allow you to easily build a new page that will have a
branded look that’s all your own.
Step #4: Promote Your Content
When you’re talking about SEO Services,
it’s easy to take an “if you build it, they will come” approach, especially
when you know that your page is designed specifically to rank on page 1 of
Google. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore the promotion process.
After you publish your power
pages:
Post them on all your social
channels
Then pay to boost them
Send an email out to your
subscriber list
Buy Google Ads so you can take up
even more page 1 real estate
Don’t forget good old-fashioned
link-building
Send them out to influencers in
your space
Find people with broken links to
similar content and send them yours as a replacement
Let anyone that you linked to
within your power page know that you did so (who knows, maybe they’ll
reciprocate)
Use Power Pages to Crush the
Competition
More than four million blog
posts are created every day. Many of those posts are 300-500 words and are
written so the site owner can boast about having content (or just to have
something to promote on social media). You can’t compete with that content for
search traffic on that level – there’s too much of it.
What you can do is
focus on creating power pages. Instead of writing fifteen 300-word blog posts
that won’t bring you any search traffic, write one 4,500-word blog post that
will get you ranked for more keywords. And once you start to see results on
your first power page, create another. You’ll see your traffic grow each month
as your competitors flatline.
