Every failed content program we audit shares the same birth defect: keywords chosen by volume, not winnability. A 40,000-search term your site cannot win for two years is worth less than a 300-search term you can own by autumn. This strategy exists to make that judgment for every target, before money gets spent writing.
Your existing rankings, live SERPs, competitor coverage, and the questions your market actually asks, including what AI engines get asked.
Queries collapse into clusters by what the searcher is trying to do, checked against what actually ranks, because Google's grouping outvotes anyone's guess.
Each cluster is scored against your site's authority and the strength of who holds the positions today. Ambition is free; this number is not.
Clusters get weighted by business value: buying intent, fit with your offer, and what a visitor from that query is worth.
Every surviving target lands on a page with a job, ordered into the sequence a small team can actually execute. Then the QA gate reads it like a hostile stranger.
It is for teams about to invest in content or on-page work and unwilling to guess the targets, and for sites whose current rankings feel random because they are.
It is not for you if nobody will create or update content afterward; a map nobody drives is decoration. And if you need the full year sequenced with budgets and milestones, that is the Growth Plan, which contains this thinking inside it.
Your market, your competitors as you see them, and any targets you already believe in.
Harvesting, clustering and scoring on live data.
The adversarial review, with generic-dump findings grounds for automatic failure.
The map in your dashboard, one revision round included.
| Alternative | Typical cost | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Tool subscription plus an afternoon | $100 to $250/mo | Ten thousand rows, zero decisions |
| Retainer research month | $2,000 to $5,000 | Often this deliverable, arriving in month two |
| Guessing from the founder's instinct | Free | Sometimes right, never measurable |
The honest answer: as many as are worth targeting, organized into clusters, usually far fewer than a tool export and worth far more. Volume of rows is the metric of dumps.
Live SERP data, your existing rankings and pages, and competitor coverage. Search volumes inform but never decide; winnability and value decide.
No, it decides what to write. The SEO Content subscription executes against this exact map at 4 pieces a month, or your team can.