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.
