how to do keyword research for blog

how to do keyword research for blog

how to do keyword research for blog .Which keywords should you target when you'rejust starting out? And can you actually rank for them? In today's keyword research tutorial, I'm going to show you how to do keyword research for a brand new website. Stay tuned. [music] What's up SEOs, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, theSEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche. Now, this tutorial isn't full of rainbows and butterflies. There isn't exactly a cookie-cutter formulathat'll solve all of your keyword research woes. If you're not willing to put in the work, or you're not willing to pay someone to do it for you, then don't bother watching this video. But if you want to get results and predictablyrank for keywords that are going to drive traffic and revenue for your business, then let's get to it.

So last week, I searched for "list of niches"in Google, clicked on the first result, copied the categories down, and put them into this random, "wheel spinner." I spun the wheel, [Dating and relationships... Dating and relationships...] and here's our topic for the day.... Fitness and weight loss. A seed keyword is usually a broad term relatedto your niche. Generally speaking, they'll be one or two words long. So in our case, "fitness" and "weight loss" would be our seeds. Now, to drill down on the idea of seeds, let'ssay we had a site on pet care. Our seed keywords might be "pet," "pets," "dog,""dogs," "cat," "cats"... you get the point. Now, in order to research keywords, you'llneed a keyword research tool. The two tools I recommend are Keywords Everywhereand Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. 

Keywords Everywhere is great because you canget basic keyword metrics like search volume and CPC data for free. So if you're just starting out, this mightbe a good tool to try. But naturally, it will come with some limitations. Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer on the other handhas all the bells and whistles, a massive database of around 8 billion keywords, and will give you numerous layers of data that are critical for keyword analysis. So I'll be using that tool for the rest of the tutorial. So let's start by taking our seed keywordsand enter them in Keywords Explorer. Now, I'll run the search. Next, I'll go to the All keywords report inthe sidebar and you'll see a massive list of 2.6 million keyword ideas. Now, if you look at the keywords, you'll seethat a lot of them are irrelevant. So we'll need to brainstorm a list of keywordsthat are relevant to your seeds. Since we're talking about fitness and weight loss, some words that come to mind for me would be "diet," "bodybuilding," "training," "calorie," and "dumbbells." So let's make a note of these on our "relevant keywords" list. 







Next, look to Google autosuggest. First, I'll type in "weight loss," and you'll see words like "pills," "smoothies," "foods," and "programs." So let's add these to our list too. Now, I'll do the same for "fitness." But it doesn't look like there's anything relevant, so I'm actually going to run the search. Next, I'll scroll to the bottom of the pageand look at the Related searches. So we have "workouts" and "body." Let's add these to our list too. Now, if you find the autosuggestions to behelpful, then you can get a much larger list using the Search suggestions report inKeywords Explorer. If we go to that report with "fitness" and "weightloss" as our seeds, then you'll see around 2,600 keywords to look through. So "equipment," "shakes," and "meal plans," wouldbe good ones to add to our list. One last place you can look is Google Correlate. So I'll search for "weight loss" and now wecan see some more interesting words like "fat," "abs," "burn," "whey" and "protein." In fact, the word "abs" makes me think of other body parts like "chest," "shoulders," and "legs." Now, that we have a list of relevant keywordsto our seeds, let's go back to the All keywords report and filter our list down to ones we can consider targeting. 







To remove a lot of these irrelevant keywords,let's click on the Include filter and paste in a comma separated list of our relevant keywords. I'll also set it to show "Any word," whichwill narrow down our list to only keywords that contain any of these words. And we're now down to around 188,000 keywords from 2.6 million! And as you can see, the list looks much better. Alright, so rather than skimming through 188,000keywords, we're going to start adding additional layers of filters to get even more targeted. Now, generally speaking, you're going to seethree types of keywords. The first are money terms. They're generally hard to rank for becausepeople don't want to link to pages that target these kinds of keywords because there's verylittle value add for them and their audiences. Next are keywords around topics that generate backlinks. And the goal is to build authority to these pages,and funnel PageRank to other topically relevant pages. Finally are low-competition keywords. These are keywords you can rank for withoutbuilding a ton of links. Targeting these keywords are important becausethey'll help you get some search traffic faster and slowly start the progression of natural link growth. 







Now, at this stage of keyword generation, allwe're trying to do is find as many keywords that are relevant to your business. So for now, don't worry about keyword analysisbecause we'll dive deep into that later. So let's start off by finding low-competition keywords. Let's go back to where we left off in the All keywords report. Since we still have a pretty large pool ofkeywords, let's narrow this down to keywords that have at least 500 monthly searches. Much better. Now, to find low-competition topics let'sset a Keyword Difficulty filter to a maximum of something low-ish like 20. Looking at the keyword list, you'll see acouple of irrelevant ones at the top related to "planet fitness," which are clearly branded queries. So let's exclude these from our keyword listby clicking on the Exclude filter. And I'll type "planet" and apply the filter. If you're unfamiliar with Parent topic, it determines if you can rank for your target keyword while targeting a more general topic instead. For example, rather than creating a post on"what is the best diet for me" and then another on "best diet for me," the Parent topic is telling us that.







Now, before you go off and start targetingonly parent topics, take note that if the parent topic is different from the query in the Keyword column, then you should check its keyword difficulty scores too. For example, the keyword, "whey protein forweight loss" has a KD of 13. But if we click on the parent topic, "whey protein," you'll see that it has a much higher Keyword Difficulty score. So what should you do? That'll depend on what you see in your keywordanalysis, which again, we'll dive into later. So for now, I'll quickly sift through thislist and rather than analyzing every keyword, I'm just going to add a checkmark beside theones that seem like interesting topics to create content around.







Let's call this one "weight loss - low competition." Then go through the remaining pages until you're satisfied with the number of keyword ideas. Next, let's fill our second bucket of keywordswith potentially link-bait worthy topics. Again, the purpose of these pages is to getquality backlinks so you can build authority to your pages, and pass PageRank by linkinginternally to your other pages. So the way we're going to discover these keywordsis by finding pages that have already generated a ton of links, reverse engineer why they might have had such great success, and then take that angle but create better contentfor some Skyscraper-styled link building. So let's start by entering some seed keywordsin Keywords Explorer.







Now, we're actually going to do the oppositeof what we did for low-competition keywords. We're going to set a minimum Keyword Difficultyscore to something high like 70. And the reason why we're doing this is becauseAhrefs' Keyword Difficulty score is calculated by taking a weighted average of the number of referring domains pointing at the top-ranking pages. Meaning, the higher the KD score, the morelinks there are pointing at the top 10 pages. And I can't take credit for this little hack. This is something that Gael Breton from AuthorityHacker shared with me at a conference last year, so thank you. Again, I'm going to sort this keyword listby parent topic to group our list of potential link-bait topics together. Now, to remove some of the ultra long-tailkeywords in this list, I'm going to set a filter to only show keywords withat least 100 monthly searches.







And that's because we're looking for topicsto create link-worthy pieces on, rather than keywords to target. For example, we could create a tool that'sa "weight loss calculator." And you'll see below are a bunch of brandedqueries that we probably won't go after, so I'll go to the next page. Then we see a couple topics on losing weightand losing weight fast. Based on the SERP for this topic, a well-researchedguide with a case study might work well to generate links. Now, looking further, we have the parent topicof "fitness tracker." And based on the keyword ideas under thisparent topic, I'm guessing this has something to do with fitness tracker reviews and comparisons. 







Now, since most affiliates aren't actuallybuying the products, testing them, and reporting back, that's something I might do to gain a bit of an edge and have plenty of link prospects to reach out to. Now, in terms of the SEO strategy that goesalong with these link-bait style pages, I'll link up our video on "The Middleman Method"in the description so you can carry this out to completion. Finally are finding money terms. Now, "money" terms will vary depending on thenature of your business. For example, an Ecommerce store might wantto rank for keywords that have transactional intent like "buy product name." And an affiliate site might want to rank forqueries that include words like "best," "top," "comparison," "vs," or "review." So assuming our fitness and weight loss websitemonetizes through affiliate commissions, I'll go to a filterless version of the Phrase match report and add those keywords in the Include filter. I'll also want to set the option to "Any word" so I can see all phrases that mention any of these words. From here, you can create your own combinationof filters to target low-competition keywords, keywords with decent search volume, or both. Again, sift through the list, add checkmarksto anything that interests you, and create a new list. But not all of them will be worth going after. So let's move on to the next step, which isto identify search intent for each of the keywords on your list. 







If you can't match what searchers want, thendon't go after that keyword. The easiest way to identify search intentis to look at the top 10 ranking pages for your target keyword. For example, looking at the top 3 resultsfor "how to lose weight," you can tell just by reading the titles that all of the pagesare informational blog posts. If you have a blog and can write a guide onlosing weight, then yes, you can fulfill search intent. Whereas a query like, "fitness equipment," shows product and category pages for Ecommerce stores. If you don't have an Ecommerce store, thendon't bother going after this query because you won't be able to match search intent. There's no proven trick around this and itliterally takes 10 seconds to do, so do it for all keywords that you're interested ingoing after and make a note of search intent. Now, if you set up a list in Keywords Explorerlike I did earlier, then instead of Googling every single keyword, you can just click onthe SERP button to see.







This brings us to the next step, which isto assess ranking difficulty. Now, SEO and ranking on Google is like a game. Certain levels are easy to beat. And others require you to level up beforeyou can beat the bigger bosses. For example, if you couldn't see the healthbar for your opponents, then you'd have no idea what it would take to win. In the same way, you need to know who you'reup against so you'll know what it takes to outrank them. And for that reason, you need SEO metricsto create some sort of predictability in ranking. Now, there are 3 things you need to look at. First are the number of referring domains,which are unique websites linking to the page. Second is the authority of the ranking domains. And third is topical relevance of the topranking pages and websites. Let's run through some examples here. If we look at the SERP for "weight loss workoutfor men," you'll see that there aren't a whole lot of unique websites linking to the pages.







Not bad on that front. Next is to look at the authority of the ranking domains. And we can do this by using the DR or Domain Rating metric, which represents the overall strength of a website's backlink profile. Looking through the results, you'll see thesetwo with low-ish Domain Ratings at 34 which have managed to rank pretty high in the organicsearch results. And with a little bit of link building, they can probably be outranked. Finally, we'll look at the relevance of the top ranking pages as well as their domains as a whole. Just by looking at the domain names, you cantell that all of them are related to health and fitness. So overall, the top pages come from relevant domains. Now, when we're looking at topical relevanceof the page, we're focusing on a bit of the on-page SEO part. Generally speaking, people tend to use theirprimary keyword in the title or a modified version of it. So as a new or developing website, this mightbe an opportunity to leverage specificity and generate more clicks by speaking to thetarget audience. So in my opinion, it wouldn't be too difficultto rank in the top 5 for this keyword if  a) you have a topically relevant domain, b) you can get







Looking at the topically relevant pages forour target keyword, you'll see that this page gets around 2,000 monthly search visits fromthe US alone. Use these numbers to make informed decisionson whether ranking your page will be worth your time, money, and effort. In my opinion, this one is worth the perceived effort. Now, if we were to do this for another oneof our so-called low-competition topics like "weight loss workouts for women," then we'llcome up with a slightly different analysis. For example, you'll see that the first tworesults from self.com and shape.com don't have mention of "women's". But these two websites create content that'smostly targeted at women. And these two articles are no different. The next result from Livestrong is clearlyabout workouts for women. Then the one from bodybuilding.com doesn'tappear to be targeted at a specific gender, but when you look at the content, you'll seethat the writer wrote it for women, by.







So all things considered, this may not beas "easy" of a keyword to rank for considering the current competition in the top 10. But looking at the global traffic potential,you might think that getting somewhere in the ballpark range of 10,000 monthly searchvisits would be well worth the work. This is why it's important you analyze everysingle topic before you start creating content. If you're going to spend hours writing a newpiece or spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for production, then it's important to knowwhat you're getting yourself into. Now, after you've qualified your target keywordsand you're ready to start writing, there's one last piece to keyword research that I highly recommend. And that's to extract subtopics based on thekeyword rankings from the top 5 relevant pages. By looking at the keyword rankings for thetop pages, you can essentially get "clues" of related subtopics you should include in your post. So using the example of "weight loss workoutsfor women," I'll click through on the keywords number to see this page's organic rankings.







Now, it's important to note that this stepisn't about stuffing keywords in your post. Instead, use it to form an angle for yourpost, and extract subtopics that you should cover throughout your content. For example, you'll see that people searchingfor this are likely beginners, they want a routine for the gym, and an interesting angle to take might be to create it as a one-week workout plan. Take all of these points, create an outline, and you'll have a data-driven way to create your content. And there is a ton of different ways to do it. So I highly recommend digging through someof our other keyword research tutorials on topics like long-tail keywords and mappingkeywords to your sales funnel. And before we wrap this up, make sure to like,share, and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials like this one.