Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the third lesson in our keyword research module.
In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to find keywords for your website based
on the things you learned in lesson 1 and 2 of this module.
Let's get started.
So, keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people are searching
for in search engines.
And the general process can be divided into two macro steps.
Step 1 is to generate keyword ideas.
And step 2 is to validate whether those keywords are worth going after.
Now, this lesson is mostly about step 1: generating keyword ideas for your website.
And in order to do that, you need a keyword research tool.
Keyword research tools show you information on keywords like their search volume, keyword
difficulty scores and other SEO metrics.
Plus, they should help you discover potential topics worth going after.
There are a lot of tools out there and you're free to use whichever ones you want.
But for this course, I'll be using Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.
Now, I also understand that some people may not be in a place to purchase SEO
software right now.
If that's you, then we also have a free tool called Ahrefs Keyword Generator, which is
a good place to start.
I'll leave links to both tools in the description.
Alright, so we're going to be doing some keyword research for the rest of this lesson.
So let's say that the website we're doing keyword research for is a golf blog.
And the way this blog generates revenue is through affiliate commissions, meaning they
promote other people's products and when someone clicks on one of the links and makes
a purchase, you're compensated with a commission.
So the first step is to come up with a list of seed keywords.
And a seed keyword is just a broad keyword related to your niche.
So I'll go to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer and add a few seeds for our golf site.
So that might be "golf balls," "golf clubs," and "golf hats" to name a few.
Next, I'll go to the Phrase match report which will show us keywords that include
any of these phrases.
And just like that, we have around 125,000 keyword ideas with search volumes and
a ton of other helpful metrics, some of which we'll touch on later.
Now, 125,000 keywords is just way too much to filter through.
So before we continue, let's take a second and revisit the 5-point checklist from
the first lesson in this module.
Again, the 5 things we're looking for when it comes to choosing keywords are:
1. We want keywords that have search demand.
2. Keywords with traffic potential.
3. Keywords with business potential.
4. We need to be able to match search intent.
And 5. We want to know how hard it'll be to rank at the top of Google for that keyword.
So when we're generating keyword ideas, we'll be able to check off the first 4 points.
As for the fifth, we'll tackle that in the next lesson.
Alright, let's look back at our list of keyword ideas and start checking
off some of these boxes.
So first, we need to find keywords that have search demand.
To do that, you can set a search volume filter to show keywords with a minimum volume of
at least 300 monthly searches.
And now that list has just shrunk to 351 keyword ideas which will be easy to manually filter through.
The next point on this list is to see if they have traffic potential.
Again, traffic potential is a more reliable metric than search volume because not
all searches result in clicks.
And at the end of the day, we want traffic.
Not searches.
To check the traffic potential of a topic, you need to look at the top-ranking pages
and see how much traffic they're getting.
To do that, you can click on the SERP button beside any of these keywords.
So if we do that for the query "golf clubs," you'll see that the top page gets around
16,000 monthly search visits from the US.
Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can get a free version of the SERP using
Ahrefs' SERP checker tool.
Next up is business potential.
Again, business potential is simply the value a keyword has to your business.
And while 16,000 monthly search visits seems great, you need to consider the fourth point on
the checklist which is to ask yourself if you can match search intent.
As you can see, almost all of the top-ranking pages are ecommerce category pages.
So searchers are probably in shopping mode.
But we have a golf affiliate blog, so the site probably isn't selling golf clubs.
Meaning, we can't create an ecommerce category page and therefore, we won't be
able to match search intent.
So seeing as this query doesn't fulfill the points on our checklist, we wouldn't go
after this keyword.
Now, looking further down the list, you'll see the query "best golf balls."
It has a high search volume and if I click on the SERP button, you'll see
that the traffic potential is around 5,000 monthly visits from the US.
Pretty good.
Now, in terms of business potential, this keyword would have a value of 3 because our site makes
money by reviewing and recommending products.
So it would be super-easy to organically recommend products in a "best of" post, which I assume would
lead to a fair amount of affiliate commissions.
As for search intent, these are blog posts in the listicle format with the freshness
content angle as you can see from titles of the top-ranking pages.
So this query checks all boxes and passed our initial sniff test.
So I'll click on the checkbox and add it to my "golf" keyword list.
Now, checking the SERP for all of these keywords would be pretty time-consuming.
So there's a quick technique you can use to find relevant keywords.
And that's to use keyword modifiers.
A modifier is an add-on to a base keyword.
For example, if our base keyword is "golf hats," we can modify this keyword by adding
"best," "top", or the current year.
And modifiers tell us a lot about search intent.
A word like "best," again, tells us that a comparison needs to be made.
So searchers are probably looking for listicle blog posts with various different
product recommendations.
Now, if a word like "how" or "what" is in the keyword, then it tells us that the top pages
will likely be blog posts or videos with step-by-step tutorials or some other
informational content.
So with this knowledge, we can actually filter this keyword list down to
a) keywords that likely have business potential,
and b) keywords where we can match searcher intent.
For example, since we're doing keyword research for an affiliate site, modifiers like "best," "top", "vs,"
and "review" would likely bring up topics where we can organically recommend products.
So if we go back to the keyword list, we can click on the "Include" filter and paste
this list there.
Next, I'll hit the "Any word" tab since we want to find keywords that include any
of these modifiers as well as one of our seed keywords.
Hit Apply, and we now have a list of around 30 keywords that are most likely going to
have high business potential.
Plus, we know that 99% of the time, the results for any "best" type keyword will
be listicle blog posts.
And we know that we can match searcher intent with our affiliate blog.
Now, if we switch the modifiers in the Include filter to words like "how," "what," "who," "where,"
"why," "guide," and "tutorial," then we can apply the list to find informational topics that we
could write about on our blog.
And pretty much all of these keywords would be fair game for our hypothetical golf blog.
Now, if you plan to use a list of modifiers, then it's worth noting that you should
probably do it with much broader seeds.
For example, you'll see that we only have 10 keywords when using the search volume
filter paired with our list of informational modifiers.
Now, if I change the seed to just "golf," set the volume filter to a minimum of 300 monthly
searches, and then paste in my list of informational modifiers, hit the "Any"
tab, and click Apply, then you'll see we have a lot more topics that we could potentially
create content around.
So if this is a method you want to try, then take a screenshot of this list of modifiers
and feel free to use them in your keyword research.
Now, after doing keyword research for exactly 33 minutes and 14 seconds,
I was able to compile a list of over 190 keyword ideas in my golf keyword list.
Now, one downside to using keyword research tools is that the list of keyword
ideas will usually be limited to words and phrases that include your seeds.
But there are other great keywords that won't necessarily include your seeds.
So, how do you find them?
Well, the best way to find these keywords is to look at pages that drive the most search
traffic to your competitors' sites.
Because if your competitors are ranking for keywords that are sending them a ton
of search traffic, then I'm sure you'd want to get in on the action, right?
Now, by competitor, I'm not necessarily talking about your direct business competitors.
I'm referring to your organic search competitors, which are websites that rank for keywords that
you'd want to rank for.
So to find these competitors, I'll go back to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, but this time,
I'll click on my golf keyword list.
Next, I'll go to the Traffic share by domains report, which will show you the websites that
get the most search traffic based on your keyword input.
In this case, our golf keyword list.
So as you can see, sites like golf digest, golf.com, and golfwrx are getting the most
search traffic from the keywords that I want to hypothetically rank for.
But we already know these keywords since we created the list.
So what you can do is click on the caret beside a domain you want to research further,
and then click Top Pages, which will show you the pages that send the most search
traffic to a website.
And check this out.
Golf Digest's page on "game improvement irons" gets around 5,400 monthly search
visits from the US.
This page that ranks for "what degree is a sand wedge" gets around 4,700 monthly
search visits.
And we wouldn't have seen these in the keyword ideas report because
they don't contain our seeds.
So you can just skim through this list, look for potential topics, then go through those
4 points in the checklist for keywords that are interesting to you.
Add them to your keyword list and once you've exhausted a website's top pages, rinse and
repeat for the other organic search competitors until you're satisfied with your list.
And if you're still unhappy with your list, you can try and find other seeds within this report.
The two that stand out to me right away are "sand wedge" and "fairway woods."
So I'll go back to Keywords Explorer and type those into the search box.
And seeing as both of these are different types of golf clubs, you can add "pitching
wedge," "putter," "putting" and so on and so forth.
Bottomline: there should be no shortage of keyword ideas and you should be able to use
these two methods to build a solid list of topics to keep you busy for years.
But here's the thing: even if you've checked off these four boxes on the checklist, there's
still one left.
And it won't matter if you don't rank for your keywords.
So tomorrow, we'll be publishing the next lesson, where we'll go through a simple
process to understand how hard it'll be to rank for your keywords in Google.
So make sure to subscribe so you don't miss that and if you're watching this video at a later
date, then check the description because we'll have a link to the entire course there.
I'll see you in the next lesson.