🔎 Focus: Content
🔴 Impact: High
🟢 Difficulty: Very Low

My Core Keyword Of Today

Scenario: I want to rank #1 for this topic: Car Battery. I sell car batteries so my core focus is to capture users looking for my products. Typical eCommerce standard…

Traffic potential: 118k users per month
Search volume: 247k user per month

There are people searching for “car battery“ and DO NOT click on the #1 result but on lower ranked pages: user is still getting its way to what the want and need.

Business topics can get quite competitive

Considering that ranking #1 for “car battery“ will be a lost battle in the short term, I will aim to related topic within the same intent (transactional, non-branded) but with lower competition.

💁‍♂ Note: I still target my golden topic “Car Battery“ with a landing page that directly meets the user needs: a product page with many car batteries to sell.

So, let’s get side topics what will get us the same traffic quality than our core topic.

Ready? Let’s goooooooo

Step 1 - Get the seed low-competition keywords

Getting low-competition keywords might be a step that is familiar with. The next step will be: capturing they AI mentions related to those topics.

Go to Ahrefs > Keyword Explorer > Matching Terms
Filter by:
- Intent: Commercial, Transactional, Non-branded
- Keyword Difficulty: up to 25

You will get the easiest topics to target. Take the most relevant (both by topic and search volume). I am taking this “car battery replacement“:

My potential customer is searching to replace the battery
My business offer batteries for that user to buy
It is not a difficult topic, we could rank relatively easy on all search platforms (Google, Chat GPT, Perplexity, etc)

Instead of targeting a high-competition topic
we are going after a low-competition one

Click on the focus side keyword “car battery replacement“ and get the top competitor:

The top competitor will be used in the next step

Take the top ranking competitor to capture the content cited by AI (in the next step)

Step 2 - Analyze the competitor to outrank

Not only outrank on Google, we are looking to win citations too.

Did you know? Getting Cited Is Easier Than Getting Mentioned

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7366055920906240000/

Go to Ahrefs > Brand Radar and plug in the domain you got from the previous step:

Competitor being analyzed by Ahrefs’ Brand Radar

Next we will filter the cited pages of our competitor:

Go to Cited Pages > Filter by
- Prompt: Phrase Match = car battery
- Domain: autozone.com (my top competitor)
- Tracked LLM: in this case we are looking a AI Overviews but you can track any major LLM like Chat GPT, AI Mode, Perplexity, etc.

We will capture all cited pages in the related to “car battery“ (our core topic).

Filter cited pages on Ahrefs’ Brand Radar

Step 3 - Drafting My AI Search Content Plan

Ahrefs will give me all the relevant pages that trigger the term “car battery“. But let’s remember that topic is rather difficult to rank in the short term. I need to focus on something related to my low-competition topic: “car battery replacement“.

You can easily find the most relevant cited pages you should consider for your content plan as I did here:

Topics where my competitor has been cited hundreds of times the last 90 days:

How long it takes to charge a battery? (with the car on)
How long should a car battery last?

Those topics are highly relevant for my audience and match the low-competition topic I chose earlier (car battery replacement):

Their car battery is having issues: they need to buy a new one

The “car battery” pages are just an example. The cited pages of our competitors gives away pretty much the entire content strategy we should follow to both:

Rank for low-competition topics on Google AND;
Being cited by LLMs on AI summaries/responses

The final step would be to download the data for in-depth analysis.

To get all the citation data per page, click in the citation number dropdown:

I get all the prompts where my competitor was ranked:

From the data download I get exactly which domains and pages are being cited. I also get all my competitors for that given prompt so my content can get sharper and rank better than any of them.