Your Guide to Keyword Research Using SEMRush
This is your guide to teach you how to conduct Keyword Research using SEMRush.
Good keyword research, however, allows you to uncover terms, phrases, questions, and answers that are important to your target users and therefore important in achieving your goals as well.
This article sums up Keyword Research Basis and Competitor Analysis for Keyword Research.
1.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword Research is an important and integral part of any digital marketing strategy, and thereby it is important to understand that it will never fade away.
Moreover, This is the processor of finding the right keywords for all the possible search engines like Google search which are relevant to your business and customers whether you provide products or services.
Keyword Research, moreover, sets you up for building effective strategies for improving your content to get better rankings and to rank on a wide variety of terms.
Therefore, driving more organic traffic to your website.
To find keywords, you can use different applications like SEMRush, google trends, AHERFS, etc. Moreover, link building is crucial for your SEO.
Moreover, It not only includes finding the right keywords but also sorting and prioritizing them into logical, related groups which can inform how you might want to change the existing pages of your website to create new content.
You can do the keyword research using different tools like SEMRush, Aherfs, Google Ads, or Google Keyword Planner. It lets you search terms and provides monthly search volume.
Why is Keyword Research Important?
While some SEOs might not consider keywords to be important, however, they are still very crucial for your blog posts or webpages, not only for your search engine rankings but also for understanding the search intent behind a query.
For as long as people are typing their queries in the search box or making a voice query on an ‘assistant’ it will be crucial to understand the following:
- What those queries are?
- How important they are?
- How you might want to shape your content to answer the intent of the query?
Why should you do it?
There are multiple reasons why you should conduct keyword research or keyword explorer on a regular basis. These are as follows:
Keyword Change: There are different ways of saying the same thing and trends often change the queries how people search for online.
Changing Audience: Your audience is growing and changing and so does how they use the search engines.
Evolving Search Engines: With changing times, Search Engines are evolving too. Algorithms are more advanced to better understand the content and also match the user’s intent.
Upgrading Content: Moreover, you need to upgrade your content and make it relevant according to the users and their search queries.
To understand Keyword Research Basis and Competitor-based keyword research, let move forward.
2.
Keyword Research Basics using SEMRush
The SEMRush toolkit offers you different ways to gather the best keywords, moreover, good basics never fail and traditional keyword research is where you should start.
Steps to take under research basics are Quick analysis, building a keyword master list, and finding a competitive edge.
Getting a Quick Analysis
Keyword overview in SEMRush is the easiest way to get a quick analysis of your keywords.
A comprehensive summary of all the major matrices, volume, CPC, competition in paid search, top-ranking pages, ad copy, and more.
You can, however, do it by launching the report, entering your keyword in the search field, and then start analyzing.
Ad History Report
This feature lets you identify advertising trends and understand if the keyword was active in the past in paid research.
Moreover, you can see all the domains that bid on the keyword you are searching for and had a PPC and over the past year.
The number in the cross-sections, however, shows the paid position of the ad in any given month over the past year.
Moreover, It is important to note that the position is not necessarily the location of the ad on the search result pages.
Even if you are the biggest bidder, your ad can appear under the organic search engines,
Moreover, you can also see the amount of ad traffic, price, and the total number of ads for that keyword.
You can learn more about content marketing here.
Keyword Magic Tool
It is a powerful tool for in-depth keyword analysis and for building a master list for your website.
Moreover, You can explore your niche, and find related long-tail keywords, that are broken down into topic-specific subgroups.
The key here is to start with a single seed keyword.
Hit search and get to work.
You can explore the groups and subgroups of the related topics to find niche and long-tail keywords and ideas for your PPC and groups.
You can also sort groups by volume or by the number of keywords, however, exclude groups that you do not require.
Therefore, It is important to key in mind that all the advanced filters you have applied will also apply to the list of topics.
Moreover, pay attention to the Match Modifiers, which allows you to broaden or narrow down your keyword selection to your liking.
Make use of the Questions Filter as well. This feature allows you to sort out question-based keywords.
These drive tons of quality traffic and often trigger featured snippets which can serve as a shortcut to the top of SERP.
Using Advanced Filters can further specify the scope of your keyphrases with a range of word counts, search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, competitive density, and the number of results in the SERP.
Keyword Difficulty: Finding a Competitive Edge
You might not be able to rank for every keyword in your master list. Therefore, you need to choose wisely where to put your efforts first.
Hence, we land on Keyword Difficulty Metric.
This metric index gives percentages and the higher it is, the harder it will be to outrank your competitors in organic search results.
Keyword Difficulty will estimate how hard it is to organically outrank for a keyword against your competitors.
You can find this in a column in every SEMRush report listing keywords as KD%.
Besides difficulty, it also shows the monthly volume of a keyword, the number of URLs, and SERP features.
Moreover, you can also see the SERP’s snapshot and the trends of a keyword’s popularity over the previous year.
With this knowledge, however, you can find low competition keywords and can realistically target in organic search and which you should ignore your SEO resources on.
Moreover, you can add up to 100 keywords in the Keyword Overview Report.
3.
Competitor based Keyword Research
Competitor-based keyword research is another approach you can use to view websites that are already on the SERP as a jumping-off point.
Instead of searching for seed keywords, you gather seed websites to start the research for your keyword.
Therefore, Steps to take are to discover your organic competitors, pinpoint your rivals in paid search, and compare keyword portfolios.
Let’s dig into this method of research.
This section is a guide to Discovering your organic competitors. It involves the following steps.
Organic Competitors
With organic research, you can also find organic search competitors, see the keywords they rank for and examine the recent ups and downs of their pages.
To start, go to Organic Search on your SEMRush dashboard, enter the domain, select the competitor’s tab and scroll down to the table.
Moreover, You will have a list of competitors and therefore, it will serve as your
seed domains.
This list is Competition Level, which shows how close of a competitor the website is to the one you have searched for.
Moreover, it is, however, also based on the number of keywords your competitor is ranked for and the percentage of keywords they share.
You can sort the domains by the Competition Level or by the number of Common Keywords as well.
How to get Competitor’s Keywords?
Next, go to the position report of the Organic Research of your seed domain.
Here you can view all the keywords that a domain ranks for in the top 100 search results.
Moreover, Each keyword that a domain ranks for is also accompanied by a URL of the corresponding landing page and some metrics to guide your process.
The list you will get is gonna be too long, so you can add some filters by clicking on the Advanced Filters button.
Find Opportunities
You can find opportunities by keeping an eye on your competitor’s rankings and their changes.
For this, however, you can go to the Position Changes tab and take a look at the list of the Lost and Declined Keywords.
Declined: These keywords have dropped positions but still rank in the top 100.
Lost: These keywords are no longer ranking.
You can also try adding filters and with some luck, you may find some keywords to use on your website.
Pinpoint your Rivals
Finding paid competition is the easiest way with Advertising Research on SEMRush.
The workflow here is similar to ORganic Research.
You can, however, start the report, type your domain, and switch to the Competitors tab.
At the top, you can see the Competitive Positioning Map which visualization is based on Paid Search Traffic of the domain.
It also shows the Number of Paid Keywords.
Moreover, it also gives you an overview of a paid search competition landscape
The table is by default the same as in Organic Research and is labeled as Competition Level.
Here you can pick up seed domains from the top competitors. You can click on the arrow icon to open the website in a new tab or click the domain name.
Analyze Paid Keywords
To collect and analyze the keywords, go to the Position report of advertising research.
To make the most out of it, you can, however, use Advanced Filters like including a volume greater than 1k, excluding keywords with your competitor.
Moreover, you can try different filters to narrow down the list and find low-cost and low-competition keywords for your PPC campaign.
Comparing Keyword Portfolios
The Keyword Gap tool in SEMRush allows you to compare multiple domain’s keyword portfolios side by side.
Moreover, It is a great way to understand where and how much you are being outperformed in search rankings by your competitors.
Therefore, with this, you can drill down on specific opportunities to optimize your site.
Conclusion
Building a comprehensive and relevant keyword list is one of the most important SEO tools.
While starting a new SEO project, you need to optimize your on-page SEO content and new content creation. Moreover, you can use SEMRsuh for analyzing different keywords for your domain and niche and target the right audience.
Moreover, You can contact us for more on-page SEO and Off-page SEO details.