In this video, I’m going to show you how to generate a list of thousands of keywords
and find easy to rank for topics.
Stay tuned.
[Music]
What’s up guys, it's Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search
traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche.
This is the second part in our keyword research tutorial series.
So just a quick recap on the first video.
We covered some very important keyword research fundamentals.
You learned that search volume isn’t super accurate by definition and that not all searches
result in clicks to the actual results.
So think of the query “Time in New York.”
So today, we’re going to build on these fundamentals and generate a solid keyword
list using some of Ahrefs’ keywords reports so you can start creating content, rank in
Google, and get more search traffic.
Let’s dive in.
First, I’m going to go to Keywords Explorer tool and instead of searching for a specific
query, we’re actually going to start with a seed keyword in a rather broad niche so
we can find new topics.
And by “seed keyword," I’m referring to a single word or maybe two words that a lot
of searches would include.
So I’ll type in the keyword “parenting," and I’ll run the search.
On the overview page, you can see the same metrics that we talked about before.
So today, we’ll be talking about these reports here:
All, phrase match, having same terms, also rank for, search suggestions, newly discovered
and questions.
So let’s click through to the phrase match report.
The phrase match report lists keyword ideas that have an exact match mention of your target
keywords in the order they’re written.
‘Parenting’ is just one word, so if we were to type in something like “keyword
research”, then it would only look for keywords that have that whole phrase in the exact order
it’s written.
So something like “research keyword” wouldn’t appear in the phrase match report.
But it would be available in the “having same terms” report, which shows you all
of the terms of your target keyword in any order.
So looking at this report for the keyword, “parenting”, you can see that there are
over 110,000 keyword ideas that have your seed keyword in them.
And the reason why we can find so many more keyword ideas than other tools is because
our Keywords Explorer database has over 5.8 billion keywords and we update it every month
with fresh data.
So you’re unlikely to find a keyword tool with a bigger database.
Now, there are a few keywords in here that interest me.
So as my brain is processing, I can click on the “get metrics" button” to start
loading up detailed metrics on each of these keywords.
The first is "parenting styles," which is a huge topic in itself.
And then there are some other sub categories to this like "authoritarian parenting", "attachment
parenting", and "helicopter parenting."
And actually, I’m going to update the metrics on this one too, “parenting classes” since
there could be commercial value in this, plus the keyword difficulty score is quite low
and worth a look.
From here, you can do the same thing we did in the first video and analyze the clicks
vs. search volume, open up the top 10 SERPs, and look for solid opportunities with traffic
and or business value.
Now, obviously filtering through 110,000 keywords just isn’t going to work.
So let’s get into some neat filters that will save you time and bring your searches
in focus.
The first filter is to find low difficulty keywords with high volume.
This is super straightforward.
You can just set the maximum keyword difficulty number here to something low like 10 and then
the minimum search volume to something like 1,000.
Alright, so these one here looks pretty cool.
"Parenting books" and "best parenting books."
Now this is actually interesting to me.
You would think that the top keyword for this topic would be “parenting books.”
Well here, you can actually see that the opposite is true.
“Best parenting books” seems to be the top keyword for both of these queries.
Now, if we open up the top 10 SERPs for “parenting books” and look at the top keywords, you’ll
notice that the majority of these articles get the most traffic from the search query
prefixed with “best.”
So something like this would tell us a bit about keyword intent when someone types in
“parenting books” into Google.
They’re likely looking for a list of the best ones so they can pick and choose which
ones to buy.
And analyzing this search result here from npr.org titled, “Why I’ll never read another
parenting book," you’ll see that they have the second most unique linking websites in
the top 10 results, yet they only generate a fraction of the traffic compared to the
ones that are ranking higher for "best parenting books."
Now, this should tell you that if you were to create content around this topic, you might
want to create it as a list post style rather than an opinion piece or something else since
it’s pretty clear on the type of post that people and Google seem to favor.
It should give you a few hints too on some of the basic on-page optimizations you should
do like in your title, your permalink, the metas, and the content.
And I do want to make a note that judging a keyword’s difficulty from something as
simple as a number between 0 to 100, usually isn’t enough.
So, this is just to give you a baseline metric for quick filtering, then you should do a
proper assessment on keyword difficulty, which we’ll be covering in the next video.
And you can also alter these numbers to ones that are relevant to your industry.
So for example, KD will likely be a lot higher than 10 for SEO related terms and I’d probably
lower the search volume to around, maybe two to three hundred.
Okay, so these two look good, so I’ll click the checkboxes here.
Then I can click “add to list" and I’ll create a new list called “Parenting Post Ideas."
Finally, I’ll apply the changes and we’re off to filter #2.
And that’s to find keywords with SERP features.
So first, I’ll clear these filters.
Next, I’ll click on the SERP features drop down here.
Now, depending on your needs, there are all sorts of different SERP features you can use
to narrow down your results.
So for example, if you wanted to see search queries that have ads, you could use the Adwords
top or bottom features.
Then there’s the knowledge type features, videos, which is kind of an interesting one
for people doing a push on YouTube and then there’s also featured snippets which is
a pretty awesome one and a low-hanging way to collect up to 8.6% of clicks, even if you
don’t rank in the #1 position.
If you’re interested in featured snippets, we’ve got a couple great posts on our blog
which you can check out, which I’ll leave links to in the description.
Now, it’s important to note that both keyword difficulty and the SERP features area here
work with cached data.
And this means that after you click the “get metrics” button, you might see slightly
different difficulty scores or SERP features.
Alright, so the next filter you can do is to look for highly commercial keywords with
low difficulty.
And the way you do that is to set the maximum keyword difficulty, again, to something like 10.
And then the minimum CPC to something like 5.
And this could be a good way for those of you who are monetizing with Adsense to rank
your pages and collect a hefty commission on each click.
This one here on parenting podcasts could be a good one.
If we look through the top 10 SERPs, you can see that the posts are mostly list posts.
So you could collect a bunch of parenting podcasts, listen to them, write reviews, and
then send an outreach email to each podcast you reviewed.
This filter is also great for companies where Adwords advertising is generally expensive.
By ranking for these lower competition keywords in organic search, you can potentially get
free traffic with high business value.
The next filter is a super cool one and that’s to use modifiers.
So I’ve already cleared all of the filters here.
This time, we’re going to use modifier keywords like "best", "top", and the past year to look
for some long tail keywords.
So in the “include” filter search box, I’ll type in best, top and 2017, separated
by commas.
Then, I’ll click on the dropdown and select “any.”
What’s interesting here is that the majority of these keywords have low-ish difficulty
scores, which often tells us that it might belong to another parent topic.
Now, if we look at the SERP results for "top parenting blogs," you'll see that the top
keyword is “parenting blogs.”
And then looking through the search results, you can see that some of these results rank
for hundreds of keywords and generate thousands of search visitors.
So this might be a good additional keyword to include in your post for a more generic
topic like “parenting blogs.”
You could also use bottom of the funnel keywords here to find keywords with high business value.
Since parenting is more of an informational topic, let’s look at the phrase match report
for the keyword “lawyer.”
So a keyword we could type in here is something like “hire.”
And here, you can see a few great topics you could write about like “hire a lawyer”
or “hire a lawyer online.”
You’ll also find some great topic ideas for earlier stages like “when to hire a
workers comp lawyer” and “how much does it cost to hire a lawyer online?”
And if you’re not into things like pro bono work, then you can pair your search with the
"exclude" feature and type in something like "free", "cheap" or both to exclude all queries
that you’re not interested in targeting.
There are an endless number of filters you can create, so I encourage you to go and play
around with the different combinations and see what works for your business.
And with these filters, you can use them in any of these other reports.
So I’ll quickly go through these so you can see some unique features that might help
you with your content marketing efforts.
So I briefly showed you the “having same terms report”, which again, shows you all
keyword phrases that have your target keywords in any order.
This one here, “also rank for,” is one of my favorite reports that I like using once
I’ve narrowed down my topic.
This report pulls the top 10 ranking pages for your target keyword and lists the other
keywords that these pages rank for.
So let’s say I wanted to write a list of post on “the best protein powder.”
Then you can get some cool keyword ideas like, "whey", "best tasting", and "for women," which
are all great sub categories you can include in your post.
There are two other cool reports that I think you’ll find super helpful.
Next is the search suggestions report.
So I’ll click it here in the sidebar on our “parenting” query.
And this report takes the autocomplete suggestions from Google and gives you all of the insightful
metrics right beside it.
So if you’re anything like me and wondered whether Google’s suggestions have any real
value at all, then it’s all available for you right here.
The newly discovered report is also really cool.
And this report shows you a list of keyword ideas that contain your seed keyword as a
phrase match that were recently added to our database.
And in order for a keyword to be added here, it needs to reach a certain level of popularity
for us to pick it up, which can cause a delay between the time people actually started searching
for the keyword and the time we add it to our database.
So please don’t treat the “newly added” report in a literal since.
It’s a great report you can use to find new searches with decent popularity.
And you can use this report to monitor and find new content ideas regularly.
For example, if we look at the newly discovered report for “Netflix,” we can see a bunch
of new queries that people are searching for.
If I press cmd + f and look for the word “leaving”, then you’ll see that every month, people
are searching for movies and shows that will no longer be available on Netflix.
And if we click on the SERP drop down for one of them, you can see that the top 10 results
are owned by news sites, where Netflix could easily create this page and siphon thousands
or even tens of thousands of visitors to their website every month.
You’ll also see that the same applies for the query “new on netflix” and “coming
to netflix” appended with the month and/or year.
Looking at the SERP results, you’ll see that again, they’re dominated by third party websites.
And you’ll see that the traffic potential is monstrous here.
For Netflix, this could potentially be an easy way to gain a ton of traffic, plus a
way to get new customers since I’m sure some people would sign up if they saw that
their favorite shows or movies were coming soon.
Another cool thing you can do in here is to monitor trending topics.
So if we look at this report with the keyword “bitcoin,” and then we click on the date
filter here, you can choose a “from” and “to” date.
But what’s super cool here is that as soon as you click the drop down, you can see the
number of newly discovered keywords that we found each month.
So from the looks of it, it seems there was a massive uptrend in 2017, followed by a rapid
decline of new search queries in 2018.
Which is actually quite interesting because this seems to correlate with their stock price.
But I’m not here to give investment advice.
So for your own brand you can see if search demand is growing and you can also look up
topics to see if your niche is booming or if it’s somewhat stable like for the query
“keyword research.”
Next, is the questions report which is really cool.
So I’ll click on it here in the sidebar.
Remember how I mentioned that parenting is a very informational kind of niche?
Well this is the perfect report for that.
This report creates a list of questions related to the keywords you’re analyzing.
These questions are cool because you can easily create very focused content targeting them.
So if there are a lot of questions in your industry, you could create your own Q&A, your
own FAQ, or some kind of series or column to target relevant questions and drive traffic
to your site.
And generally speaking, the phrases with a bunch of words in it are going to be easier
to rank for.
Take a look at this one, "which type of parenting is most effective during adolescence?"
If I open up the top 10 SERPs, you’ll see that the top results are dominated by a site
called quizlet.com, all of which don’t have a single backlink, yet still generates hundreds
of search visitors each month.
And if we click through to the top ranking page, you'll see that there are just a bunch
of definitions, which doesn't solve the searcher's intent.
That’s a lot of angry searchers, right?
Alright, the final report is the “all” report.
And this report combines all of these reports into one.
So if you’re the type of person that prefers to work with large data sets and filters,
then you’ll find this one to be indispensable.
Last, but certainly not least, I want to show you a powerful way to generate keywords from
up to ten seed keywords all at once.
So I’ll paste in a list of 10 keywords related to golf.
After the page loads, you can see the overview and a comparison of the keywords you entered here.
And you can access the same reports as we did before.
So let’s go to the phrase match report here.
Now instead of getting just the phrase match for the single keyword, you have the phrase
matches for all of the keywords in one single report.
Again, you can use filters like the include and exclude feature to narrow down your results.
So for example, "Ping" is a brand that sells golf equipment.
But it’s also the first word of the sport, “ping pong.”
So we could exclude the word “pong” from the results, which will remove tens of thousands
of irrelevant search queries.
There’s obviously an endless number of keyword ideas that you can find in these 3 reports,
so try out these different reports and filters, add some of the good ones to your content
calendar and let’s get your site ranking.
So that wraps it up for generating keyword ideas.
Make sure to subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
And in the final video in this series, I’m going to give you a data-driven way to find
out whether you can actually rank in Google for these keywords that you want to target.
Excited?
So am I.
I’ll talk to you soon.