Hi everyone, Kathryn Aragon here.
If you've done much SEO work, you know how hard it is to rank on page one.
One solution, which we've reviewed in previous tutorials, is to research your competitors so you can
go after their best keywords and replicate their high ranking content.
But in this video we're going to take a different route and find some amazing
keyword opportunities that your competitors might not even know about yet.
In particular, let's look at a process for finding some easy keywords
that you can potentially rank for within a month or two.
Step 1: finding tons of great keyword ideas.
For this, we'll use Ahrefs' powerful Keywords Explorer.
This tool runs on a massively large database of about 3 billion keywords, which is
updated with fresh keywords every month.
That's something no other tool can match.
So let's look at how you can do it.
To begin, we'll enter one or two top-level terms related to your website.
For example, let's use 'backpack' and 'backpacks', then click explore.
Scroll down and you'll see a section with keyword ideas.
Let's focus on the first list, 'having same terms.'
Above the list, we tell you how many
keyword suggestions there are in this list; in this case, well above 200,000.
Click to view the full report and you'll see the list ordered by search volume.
Remember, this number tells you how many times people search for the
keyword in Google each month in your chosen country and notice also how
relevant this list is, since all the keywords have your original search terms in them
either backpack or backpacks.
Step two: finding the best keyword opportunities for you.
With such a huge list to sort through, you need some
metrics to help you find your best keyword opportunities.
Search volume is one of the first things you'll look at.
The second is another interesting metric,
KD, or keyword difficulty. It's an estimate of how hard it will be to rank
for this keyword based on the number of backlinks the top 10 ranking pages have.
When you first open the report, the keyword difficulty scores will be grayed out.
The number you see here is the one we have in cache.
To refresh it, click on the get metrics button.
This gives you our most current data.
As you can see, you can push several buttons at the same time and just wait while it's being refreshed.
Once it's updated, the color changes, so you can see at a glance that
the difficulty score is fresh.
The color also gives you an idea of how hard it will be to rank for this keyword.
It ranges from red to bright green, with red meaning it will be very hard.
Green means it could be relatively easy if you do some link building work.
Under each term, we also give you a few icons to show you
what people see in the search engine results pages. For instance, this one has
shopping, an ad, site links, and an image.
And if we put this keyword into Google, you can see them.
Here are the search results for 'JanSport backpacks.'
Just like the icons indicated, we have shopping an ad, site links and images.
Notice that all of these features take up room on page one of the search results, which means
people have to scroll further to see the organic search results; even the top three results.
And they may not actually click on any of them, but we'll talk more about that in a minute.
For this demo, let's take 'waterproof backpack'.
First, I'll refresh the metrics.
Then we'll open it in a new tab and look at the overview page for the keyword.
Once we do this, we're ready for step 3:
researching the number of referring domains you need.
At the top of this page, you can see the keyword difficulty score for this term.
Remember, this is a score from 0 to 100 that indicates
how hard it will be to rank for the term.
And below the score, you have a hint that tells you how many backlinks you'll need to rank
in the top 10 for this keyword. For this keyword, the keyword difficulty is very low.
Let's scroll down to the search engine results page overview and see why.
Here, you can see all the top ranking pages at a glance.
Under referring domains, notice that most have low numbers, so you won't need a lot
of backlinks to compete with these pages and rank well for this keyword.
Based on this information, it looks like this keyword could be a good opportunity
since it has a relatively high search volume and a low keyword difficulty score.
But there's one more metric we need to look at to be sure.
Step 4: reviewing clicks and clicks per search.
Traditionally, we use search volume to determine
how much traffic a keyword could send your page, if you rank well for this keyword.
But just because people search for a term,
it doesn't mean they click on the results.
That's why we developed the 'clicks' metric.
This is something that only Ahrefs shows you.
No other tool tracks clicks and gives you
this kind of depth for researching keywords, at least at the time of this video tutorial.
It's likely, they'll add this functionality once they see how useful it is.
And here's why:
You can use this metric to confirm that a keyword doesn't just have a high search volume,
but can actually send traffic to your page.
Let's look at two search terms to show you what we mean.
First, let's look at 'Donald Trump age.'
Notice that even though the search volume for this term is high,
the number of clicks is very low.
Let's take it into Google to see why.
Some search queries, like this one are made when people want a quick answer.
So Google gives it to them at the top of the page in a knowledge card.
For a keyword like this one, even the top 10 pages don't get many clicks.
You can see that reflected in the 'clicks per search' number, which represents the number of
clicks divided by search volume.
And as you can see, it's way below 1, which means
that only a fraction of the searches results in a click.
Now let's look at 'iPhone 7 case'.
For this keyword, clicks are higher than the search volume,
even though only 70% of searches seem to be resulting in clicks.
And if you divide the number of clicks by the search volume, you get a 'clicks per search'
number that's greater than 1.
Any time this number is higher than 1, it means
people tend to click multiple pages when they search for this keyword.
And that's a good thing because even if you rank below number one, you
could still get a lot of traffic.
As a result, this term is definitely worth targeting.
Can you see how valuable this metric is?
Instead of finding keywords with high search volume
and assuming they'll send you a lot of traffic, you
can verify that the term actually gets clicked in the search engine results, so
you know for sure how much traffic you can get from it.
So let's review.
In Keywords Explorer, enter one or two top-level keywords that relate to your niche.
This will give you a huge list of potential keywords.
Start by looking at the search volume
because this is the basic metric we show for all keywords at once.
And it's easy to order or filter your results by it.
Same with the keyword difficulty score.
It's already cached for the best keywords in our database, so you
can order and filter by it, use it to know how much link building work it will
take to rank in the top 10 for that keyword.
Then, once you see some potentially cool keywords based on search volume and keyboard difficulty,
it's time to pull their advanced metrics to make a more educated decision.
For that, look at the 'clicks' metric.
The idea is to review these numbers for several keywords at once.
Then select the keywords you like and
add them to a list for future optimization.
In this video, we're only scratching the surface of the
advanced keyword research you can perform with the Keywords Explorer tool.
There are many other features and metrics that we didn't cover, but we'll
explain everything in future tutorials.
We'll also give you some ideas on how to
create high value pages for the keywords you choose, so you can rank higher and
get more search traffic to your site.
In the meantime, add 'clicks' to the search metrics
you review when picking your best keyword opportunities and create a
list of the easy keywords that you can possibly rank for in just a few months.