How To Start A Startup
How we built ContactOut to 8 figures in revenue. Video series with screen shares.
And then another question that you guys might think of is: What about the keyword difficulty? What about how hard it is to rank? Which I think is important if you're doing a programmatic SEO site and you're targeting, like maybe a few thousand or a few hundred keywords.
However, with ContactOut, we're targeting millions of keywords — like we have, you know, 2.6 million or like 7 million pages that we're targeting — so really keyword difficulty doesn't matter that much.
For example, the main keyword we target, like "email finder," all the pages on the first page only have a few thousand pages in total. Our competitors that have millions of pages — like, you know, RocketReach, Lusha, Apollo — none of them are ranking on this page even though they are actually the most popular tools.
Yeah, so that's why, I guess, ContactOut's case is unique. We don't look at competition as much, like keyword difficulty. But for other sites, you probably would need to look at this quite a lot.
So if we were to generalize this method, there's two approaches:
The first is to list out a bunch of popular keywords. I come up with a list of a million names and then search it on Ahrefs.
The second one is to look at, okay, what keywords are other sites — other directory sites with millions of pages — ranking for?
Here are some other large directory sites that you can check for traffic levels on Ahrefs to get a list of popular business names.
Crunchbase, where they will give you a list of all the businesses that you can check, or Whitepages if you're looking for a list of professions.
There are the job sites like Indeed. And, as we already covered, for people there are the social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., that you can see — one of the most trafficked pages.
