Keyword-first SEO

A product can find customers with no audience and no marketing budget if it is built around one search keyword chosen well. The keyword comes first, and the product, its pages and its launch all follow from it. Choosing the keyword is the step that matters most: months of work ride on it.

1. Choose the keyword

Look for one main keyword that has all three of these:

• Low difficulty: a keyword difficulty (KD) under 20. At that level, fewer than about 10 backlinks are enough to reach Google's first page. KD scales differ between tools, so quote the tool alongside the number.
• Enough volume: more than 500 searches a month in one country, which is roughly three times that worldwide. 1,500 searches at a 2% conversion rate comes to about 30 sales a month.
• Many child keywords: a large family of long-tail searches. Once the main keyword ranks, its children rank with it, and they bring most of the traffic. Figcomponents ranks for more than 1,000 keywords around "figma components", and those bring 95% of its visits.

Search keyword after keyword in an SEO tool; give it a day or two. Keyword data needs a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush, so when you have no access, ask the user for exports rather than estimating. This step is done when you have one main keyword with its KD, volume and source, plus its list of child keywords.

2. Build the product around the keyword

• Answer the search on the first screen. Give the visitor what they typed, for free and right away; time on the page is a ranking signal. Curating something that already exists can be enough: Figcomponents began as a copyable gallery of a free Figma Community library.
• Put the main keyword everywhere it reads naturally: the domain, the title, the main heading, image alt text. Keyword stuffing is penalised.
• Give each child keyword its own page, and make each page useful on its own: a tool, a component, data or an answer that the other pages don't have. Since 2024, Google's spam policies treat pages mass-produced mainly to rank as scaled content abuse, and a template with one word swapped is exactly that.
• Link every page: the most important ones from the home page, and all of them from a category page, so Google finds each one.
• Offer a free tier and a paid tier. The free tier keeps visitors on the site and earns their trust. Put some tools behind a payment, and prefer a one-time price, which converts better.

3. Earn the first backlinks

Backlinks are the strongest ranking factor. Launch on Product Hunt: the placing does not matter, because the listing is a high-authority link, and sites that repost Product Hunt launches usually add 10 to 50 more. That is often enough to reach the first page for a keyword with a KD under 10.

4. Wait

Expect about three months before Google sends real traffic, and about six more before the larger boost. Have every page live before launch so the waiting starts at once. After that the traffic keeps coming without further work; an audience only speeds up link building.

Sources

• Danny Postma, SEO thread on X (13 April 2023): the method, the numbers and the Figcomponents example are his. This skill paraphrases it.
• Google Search Central, "Spam policies for Google web search": the scaled content abuse policy, which postdates the thread.