Keyword research is one of the best ways to understand the needs of readers and then decide how to provide them with value through articles.
Blog posts targeting primary keywords have more opportunities to get more traffic, leads, and sales.
However, choosing the perfect keyword is not easy.
You need to perform keyword research to find the right keywords with the right intent and, more importantly, a profitable keyword with a good search volume.
“SEMrush” is one of the most recommended Keyword Research toolkit, that allows you to find the keywords you can use to launch awesome website & blog campaigns, increase your organic visibility, and much more.
In today’s article, you’ll see you how to use SEMrush for keyword research, take advantage of this search engine optimisation tool and a 14-day free trial coupon, so you can use SEMrush for your content without having to worried about paying the fee.
While we discuss how to use SEMrush for keyword research in this article, however, you can use the information and insights provided in any of the keyword research tools.
We just used SEMrush because it is by far the best and gives valid results.
An Introduction to Keyword Overview
To get started with SEMrush, you must sign in to your free account here.
After logging in to the SEMrush dashboard, click the Overview tab under the Keyword Analytics option (located on the left sidebar).
You’ll find a search bar on the next screen where you’ll enter a wide range of topics to find keywords to research-on.
You can also choose the country where you’d like to target your keywords (highly recommend) or choose an audience preferences.
For this particular example, I chose the keyword “Pest Control”. After all, you will get the following results page.
In the screen above, you can see 4 different reports for our preferred parent keyword “Pest Control”. Let me explain to you:
# Organic Search:
It lets you know how many people actually search for keywords in Google (110K in this example) and how many pages the term (395M) ranks. This is very difficult (but we will see how to solve these tricky keywords for a while).
# Paid Search:
This section shows, if any website or brand uses paid ads to bid on this term. If you want to bid on the word, what is the average cost per click?
# CPC Allocation:
This section shows the average cost-per-click for the country you’d like to target.
# Trend:
This is an interesting thing and a key factor in the analysis. It shows the monthly distribution of your target keywords, so you know if your keywords will drive traffic for you all year or only for specific months (for example, Halloween costumes).
This basic information is very important and gives you insight into the big image you are raising as a keyword. However, you should not only shoot for these keywords, it would be stupid.
Important tips:
You can also use the Overview option over there to research and find 5 to 6 key topics around your blog.
These topics can be used as a broad category for you. If you already have a wide range of categories, use the options above to learn more about your category topics.
Their search trends and how the SERP changes over time. This will help you build relevance scores for your website or blog to help you build permissions.
In order to further tap the gold rush, look for more profitable keywords, you need to dig deeper.
That is where we meet…
About Phrase Match and Related Keywords:
Below the Keyword Overview tab, you’ll find options for phrase matches and related keywords.
This is where the most technical keyword research takes place.
What we did in the first phase was actually finding some parent keywords that could form the backbone of our content strategy.
Targeting them or any similar parent keyword is almost impossible, at least if you just started.
To do this, you must find unresolved results (keywords with less intense competition) and use them to first build a strong ranking profile for your blog.
Important tips:
We target low-competitive keywords, because they are often abandoned by authoritative sites that already have resources to rank broader and more profitable keywords.
As a result, they typically don’t target or optimize their content for very low-search keywords, such as 60 searches per month (country-specific) or even 20 searches per month.
Are we not wasting our time focusing on things that are not fruitful?
Not at all!
In fact, these low-key keywords are easier to rank because you have specialised blog posts, unlike authoritative sites.
This way, you have more chances to rank, so the click-through rate in the SERP is higher.
Eventually these blog posts will also line up a large number of LSI keywords, which will lead to more cumulative traffic.
The SEMrush Phrase Matching Tool for Keyword Research!
Phrase matching is a good choice when you know that you have a product or theme to target but it is too broad.
Phrase matching lets you choose to find all the keywords that are closely related to your target keyword (with the exact phrase you searched for) and alternate words.
You can also use phrase matching to find alternative words for long tail keywords and product names (alternative words used by users when searching for products).
In the image above, you can clearly see two profitable keywords with good buyer intent.
This is only half of the screenshot, if you actually search it there are 15,526 keywords that match your target keyword.
We chose the keywords inside are only half of the story, use these keywords (pest control system, for wall pest management) and enter them separately, just like you did for the parent keyword.
To make it easier to rank the tail keywords.
How to use SEMrush Related Keyword Research Tool?
Are you working in a niche market that you don’t know?
Many times we come across a keyword we want to rank, but we don’t know what to write next.
With related keywords, you can easily enter specific keywords and find all relevant keywords that may not have the same terms but belong to the same industry.
The keywords I entered this time were as ambiguous as “shoes.”
To be honest, this is a keyword that is actually impossible to rank or might seem unprofitable too.
But suppose you want to work in shoes, but you don’t know the niche at all.
This is why Google’s related searches fail because they only show you closely related searches, such as online shopping for men’s shoes and shoes for men.
In order to save time and dig deeper, you can use SEMrush’s related search function to easily unlock many of your keywords, such as orange coral shoes, gold ladies sneakers, all black women’s tennis shoes, etc.
You can rinse and repeat the same steps to further optimize more keywords that are worth targeting.
Now that you have found the keywords, for these keywords, it is recommended to use the same rinse and repeat recipes to find more relevant keywords for your key topics.
Using the SEMrush Keyword Difficulty Research Tool?
Keyword Difficulty tool allows to quickly analyse a set of keywords; enter up to 100 keywords to collect data on your search volume, search trends, and SERP features.
Imagine that you found a keyword (shoes) with a monthly search volume of 773,000.
Is this not the ultimate Zen thing for your content strategy?
Is it wrong?
Most keywords have already posted content around them (I hope you know that the Internet has been around for a long time, and before you become a blogger).
Typically, these keywords have a brand or high authoritative website ranking for them.
You don’t even want to mess with their keywords because it’s almost impossible to achieve.
That’s why using keyword research tools to understand how easy it is to rank with keywords.
These tools use a lot of data, such as ranking the domain’s DA, PA, backlinks, social shares, words, trusts, and reference streams based on the tools you use.
Important tips:
After all, most tools are machine algorithms.
They do give you an idea (most of the time is correct) but do not guarantee its accuracy.
This is a question for each keyword research tool, leaving only SEMrush.
So using these tools to understand the game and then manually checking your game is always good.
The Keyword Difficulty Tool will display a 1-100% count, with a count greater than 1 towards 100 indicating an increase in keyword ranking difficulty, of which 100 is almost impossible to rank.
Using SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool for Keyword Research:
SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is a versatile, feature-rich, and more advanced keyword research tool that allows you to enter a single vocabulary keyword and build a complete related long tail keyword empire for ranking.
Keyword magic tool allows users to carry out bulk research of all the keywords related to a seed keyword of their choosing.
The results are grouped by topic, allowing users to quickly pick the most relevant ones and start preparing keywords for their next PPC campaign or SEO efforts.
Using the Keyword Magic tool, you can enter a single word and find the most relevant words and their keyword details under one tab.
You can then select these keywords (by pressing the + button) to dump them into the advanced keyword analysis tool.
Check the picture below:
Once you’ve done this, you can now refresh the statistics in the SEMrush Keyword Analyzer to find detailed statistics for each of your keywords, such as keyword difficulty, click data, estimated search volume, and the main competition that has been ranked for these terms by the opponents.
That’s all you need to take a bird’s-eye view of the entire keyword bucket.
Now choose the ones that are most relevant to your content strategy and use them accordingly.
Using SEMrush Keyword Gap Tool to Research Keywords:
This tool looks at several domains, or different parts of a certain domain, and shows which keywords they share and which are unique to each.
Make use of this tool to find out weaknesses in your competitors’ strategies and best keywords to use to get more traffic!
Enter up to 5 domains, use selectors to view organic, paid, or PLA keywords. Press the Go button when you’re ready.
Advanced Mode allows you to display domains’ keywords by common, unique, and all search queries, as well as by search terms that are unique to the first entered domain.
Explore data by using filters to sort data by specific keywords, Position, Volume, CPC, Competition, or the number of search results.
When you are done exploring, click the Export button to export data to XLS and CSV.
To analyze data, you can use a table format or switch to a visual format using a colored circle for every compared domain.
By viewing different circles’ parts and overlaps, you will easily spot domains with common and unique keywords.
Final Thought!
With this, we hope that you have a good understanding of how to use the SEMrush keyword research tool to discover hidden and profitable keywords that are easier to rank.
Not only that, but we also saw how to build a keyword empire (from a word) in a niche that we don’t know.
This is very useful, not only when you build a new website, but also on blog, we don’t usually understand the lucrative niche we want to target.
Please remember,
Our aim with these tutorials is to help you get started and win your blogging game.
But, we don’t want you to spend a penny on the first day for keyword research or anything like this.
That’s why we work with SEMrush to bring you a free trial account, so you can use it to find a whole year of blog posts and keyword ideas.
Wish you, happy keyword researching and optimizing with SEMrush.
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