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 Ahrefs, one of the most popular SEO tools currently on the market.
Before I dive in though, I thought I’d just 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 Ahrefs?
Well, to get started, you just click on its ‘Keyword Explorer’ tab in the main navigation.
Then, you enter a keyword into the box provided.
For the purposes of this demonstration, I’m going to imagine that I run a website that
sells pianos, and I want to find a keyword about buying pianos that I have a reasonable
chance of ranking for.
I’m going to start off with something really obvious: “piano.’’
When I enter this into Ahrefs, I get some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that lots of people are searching for this term: 2 million, in fact.
The bad news is that it’s going to be extremely hard to rank for.
Ahrefs estimates that in order to rank for this phrase, I’m going to need to build
455 links to my content about pianos, something that is extremely difficult to do.
So now what I’m going to do is try something a bit more specific: ‘buy a piano.’
The results here are more promising.
First, we’re getting a ‘medium’ keyword difficulty score.
We’re also getting a reasonable number of searches for this phrase.
So now we’ve gone from finding an impossible keyword to rank for to spotting something
more promising.
However, it’s possible to use Ahrefs to find something relevant that’s even easier
to rank for.
To do this, we need to use its ‘Keyword ideas’ tools, which you’ll find on the
left-hand side of the Ahrefs interface.
Within this, you’ll find three options - matching terms, related terms and search suggestions.
‘Matching’ terms will give you a set of keyword suggestions which include your phrase
in its entirety.
‘Related terms’ will show you suggestions that might not included it, but which Ahrefs
thinks are relevant.
And ‘search suggestions’ will show you the ‘autocomplete’ phrases that Google
starts to show when you type a phrase into the search box.
In most cases, you’ll probably find that the ‘related terms’ is the best option.
So going back to our pianos example, let’s take a look at what Ahrefs is showing us in
its ‘related terms’ report.
As you can see, we’re getting quite a lot of suggestions.
The little KD box - with KD standing for ‘keyword difficulty’ - lets us know how hard it will
be to rank for each one, and we can see search volumes and traffic potentials too.
But rather than scroll through all of these suggestions, we can ask Ahrefs to surface
the best ones for our needs.
To do this, we need to use its keyword suggestion filters.
You’ll find these at the top of the page.
There are quite a lot of these available, but for this demo, I’m going to focus on
two of them: keyword difficulty and global volume.
I want Ahrefs to only show me keywords that are quite easy to rank for, so I’m going
to filter my keyword score so that it only shows me keywords with a difficulty score
of between 0 and 10.
And I only want to see keywords that generate over 1,000 searches globally per month.
This returns just one result, but it’s a pretty good one: ‘best upright piano.’
We can see that this phrase is easy to rank for and generates a reasonably high number
of searches per month.
So, on my piano website, I would now consider writing a really great blog post about the
best upright pianos you can buy - and obviously feature some of the pianos I’m selling as
part of that.
So there we have it: a simple overview of how to do basic keyword research with Ahrefs.
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If you’re interested in trying Ahrefs, you’ll find a link to its free Webmaster Tools product
in the video description, along with a link to our in-depth review of the platform.
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