Hey it’s Chris from Style Factory here, the go-to site for digital marketing advice.
In this quick tips video, I’m going to show you how to perform some simple
keyword research with Semrush, one of the best-known SEO tools available.
But before taking you through the process, I want to dwell for a moment
on what keyword research is and why it matters. Keyword research is generally about 3 things:
finding out how many people are searching for a particular phrase,
establishing how difficult it is going to be to rank in search for it,
and getting suggestions for other phrases that it might be easier to rank for.
So how do you do this with Semrush? Well, the first thing you’ll need is
a Semrush account. If you don’t have one, you can grab a 7 day trial from the Semrush website.
However, Semrush sometimes make longer trials available — in fact, if you’re quick you can
get an extended 30 day trial using our affiliate link in the video description.
Ok, so once you’ve got access to your Semrush account, you start the keyword
research process by clicking on the ‘Keyword Overview’’ tab in the main navigation.
Then, you enter a keyword into the box provided. For the purposes of this demo, I’m going to
imagine that I run a website that sells guitar amps, and I want to find a keyword
about buying guitar amps that I have a reasonable chance of ranking highly for.
I’m going to start off with something really obvious: “guitar amps.’’
When I enter this into Semrush, I get some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that lots of people are searching for this term every month.
The bad news is that this term is going to be hard to rank for.
Semrush estimates that in order to rank highly for it, I’m going to need to build
78 links to my content about guitar amps, something that is pretty tricky to do.
So realistically, I’m going to need to find an alternative keyword to try to rank for.
To do this, I need to use Semrush’s ‘Keyword Magic’ tool, which is over on the left-hand
side of the Semrush interface. As you can see, clicking on this
link gives me quite a lot of suggestions, and data to help me make sense of them.
The KD percentage - with KD standing for ‘keyword difficulty’ - lets me know how hard it will be
to rank for each suggestion, and I can see monthly search volumes for each phrase too.
But rather than scroll through all of these suggestions, I can ask Semrush
to surface the best ones for my needs. To do this, I need to use its keyword
suggestion filters. These are at the top of the suggestions page.
There are quite a lot of these filters available, but for this demo, I’m going to focus on two
of them: keyword difficulty and volume. I want Semrush to only show me keywords
that are relatively easy to rank for, so I’m going to filter my keyword difficulty score
so that I am only shown keywords that the system thinks are ‘possible’ to rank for.
And I only want to see keywords that generate over 1,000 searches per month.
This returns quite a few results, but one in particular stands out — ‘mini guitar amp.’
I can see that this phrase is fairly easy to rank for and generates a reasonably high
number of searches per month. So, on my guitar amp website,
I would now consider writing a really great blog post about the best mini guitar amps
you can buy - and obviously feature some of the guitar amps I’m selling as part of that.
Now, there are other options available in Semrush that I can use to drill down further into keyword
suggestion data — for example, I can specify how closely I want suggestions to match my
original phrase, or filter results based on the intent behind a search for particular keywords.
But overall, the process is essentially the same — and now
you know how to perform basic keyword research with Semrush.
If you’re interested in trying the tool out, you’ll find a link to an extended 30-day trial
of Semrush in the video description. Please note that this is available for a limited time only.
You’ll find links to some key Semrush reviews and comparisons in the video description too.
For more digital marketing tips, do make sure you like this video, subscribe to our channel
and hit the notifications bell. And if you have any questions,
do leave them in the comments section below. We read them all and will do our best to help.