Keyword research isn't about search volume. I'll even argue that it's not entirely about
traffic either. It's about choosing topics that potential
customers are searching for, serving their needs, and eventually converting them into
customers. So in this keyword research tutorial, I'm
going to show you how to do keyword research that will help you increase traffic and revenue. Stay tuned. [music] What's up SEOs? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that
helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche. Now, this keyword research tutorial is going
to be a bit different than what you might be used to seeing. Rather than focusing on things like low competition
topics, I want to show you how to find and map keywords that will actually drive revenue
for your business. So whether you're creating a new website or you
want to revamp your current keyword targeting, the processes I'll outline today will help. Alright, so let's say that I'm starting a
new e-commerce store selling computers, parts, software, and accessories. I'll obviously need product and category pages. But I'll also want to use a blog to fuel my
traffic. The first step is to generate keyword ideas. And I'll be using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
for this. So I'll start by typing in a few broad keywords
related to my online store like computer, computers, laptop, laptops, and pc. Next, I'll go to the Having same terms report
which shows us all keyword ideas that contain the target keywords as a broad match. And there are well over 17 million keyword
ideas. Now, the point of this exercise isn't to find
as many random keywords as possible. It's to filter them down and group them by
search intent. Search intent just means "the reason behind
a searcher's query." Now, these can generally be categorized into
four groups. First, are informational keywords. And these are queries where a searcher is looking
to gain general knowledge on a topic. For example, "what is DDR4 ram?" Next, are navigational keywords. For these, the searcher usually knows the
destination they want to reach. For example, something like "newegg DDR4 ram." Third, are commercial investigation queries. These generally show that someone is looking
to get information on something that they want to eventually buy. So these will often be comparisons and include
keyword modifiers like "best DDR4 ram." Finally, are transactional keywords, which
show that someone is ready to make a purchase like "buy DDR4 ram." And if you're familiar with the sales conversion
cycle, you'll see that each of these groups fit into one of the four stages. Now, you might be wondering, why not just
go after transactional keywords since these are the ones that are going to drive direct
revenue? Two things. First, you'll limit your reach. Generally speaking, search demand will be
the lowest for transactional keywords. So if you're ignoring things like informational
queries, you'll be missing out on opportunities to squeeze yourself into your target audience's
conversion journey. Informational content can also help you build
trust and authority, so that when someone actually comes to a point of commercial investigation,
they may recognize your name. Or when they get to the transactional stage,
having previous exposure can be the difference between choosing you over a competitor. The second distinct advantage you have is
that you can accelerate people's buying journey through internal linking, retargeting, or
whatever method to get your content in front of them. For example, if my store had a blog post on
"what to do with an old laptop," and the post mentioned a buy-back program we do, it could
lead to a conversion quickly. Now, how can you determine search intent for
a keyword phrase? With some of them, you can't from the keyword
alone. But a good chunk of them can be found using
keyword modifiers. A modifier is an add-on to a base keyword. For example, that could be best, top, or the
current year. Here's a short list to get you started. Take a screenshot and let's keep going. Now I'm back in our Keyword ideas report and
I want to filter for keywords by search intent category. So I'll grab our list of informational keywords,
and paste them into the Include box here. Make sure to set the tab to "Any," which will
show us all keyword ideas that contain any of these keywords. Alright. So the filtered results still show over three
million keywords. So let's set another filter. If you're looking for low competition keyword
targets, then you can set a maximum keyword difficulty score of something low like 10. Personally, I prefer to focus on search demand
by setting the volume in tiers. So we'll set a filter to show only keywords
that have a minimum search volume of 1,000 monthly searches. And we've narrowed our 17 million results
down to around a thousand. Now you'll need to manually filter through
these. Since we're focusing on keyword research that
drives revenue, you'll have to focus on the business potential of a keyword. At Ahrefs, we assign a score between 1-3. The larger the number, the greater value the
keyword has to our business. An easy way to determine the business value
is to ask yourself this question: Can I plug my products or services into these
posts naturally? Or ask yourself, would someone searching for
this query be interested in purchasing my products or services? If the answer is no, then you should probably
move on. A quick way to sort through this list is to
sort the table by parent topic. Since a single page can rank for hundreds or thousands
of keywords, you can use the parent topic to see if you can rank for your target keyword
while targeting a more general topic on your page instead. For example, you'll see high volume keywords
that all have the same parent topic of "xbox one controller driver." Rather than creating numerous dedicated articles
on these queries about connecting an xbox controller to a PC, just choose the one with
the most search volume as long as it provides value to your business. For example, this keyword on "what is a computer
worm," could be a good one for our computer shop since we provide anti-virus software. So while it is an informational topic, we
could easily link to the different software products in our store. So I'll add a checkmark to it. Then select the rest of the keywords in your
filtered list by scanning the parent topic groups. Now, before we switch to the next page, scroll
to the top and click on "Add to" and create a list with the keyword category as the name. So these would be informational keywords. If you find that your keyword list is too
short, then just change the volume filter. Since we've already gone through searches
with greater than 1,000 monthly searches, I'll set the next one to searches that have
500-999 monthly searches and do the exact same thing until I have a large enough pool. Now, do the same thing for your other keyword
categories, and you should have a nice list of topics to target in every stage of their
buying journey. But there's still some work to do. The next step is to analyze Google's top 10
search results. Now, this is a super important step to keyword
research. The top 10 ranking pages are going to give
you information on things like content format and it'll help you understand how hard it's going to be to rank on Google for your target keyword. For example, if we click on the SERP dropdown
beside this keyword, you'll see the top 10 ranking pages. Now, the first thing you want to analyze are
the titles of the ranking pages. You can immediately tell that all of the pages
are blog posts. You'll also see that the titles talk about
what computer worms are and how they work. Rather than completely reinventing the wheel
and trying to rank this with a product page, you'll want to stick with the content format. So for my site, I might create a post called,
"What is a Computer Worm? How to Fix it When You've Been Infected." Now, just to show you how SERPs can differ,
if we look at the top 10 rankings for "4k monitors," you'll see that the SERP is dominated
by product and category pages, which to me shows more transactional intent. You can also do this step by running
a search in Google for a keyword you want to rank for. The next part is to assess how hard it will
be to rank on Google for this keyword. Now, there are a few things that I'll look
at here. First, will be the number of unique websites
linking to these pages. We call that referring domains. In this example, it doesn't look like the
top ranking pages have that many unique links outside of Wikipedia. In fact, some of the pages in the bottom half
of the SERP have 0 unique links pointing at them. Now as I'm looking through the referring domains,
I'll also look at the Domain Rating, which represents the overall strength of a website's backlink
profile. In this case, you can see that the ranking
pages all come from pretty powerful domains. So if your website has a DR of, let's say
15, you have to account for the fact that you'll be competing against pretty powerful
sites. In general, you want to play in the same Domain
Rating ballpark region, or be prepared to build more links than the top ranking pages. The final step that I'll look at is topical
relevance. Since a computer worm is in the "antivirus"
category, you'll see that a lot of the top pages are antivirus companies. So this may also tell us that it'll be a bit
harder to penetrate, but not impossible. So with all of these things considered, I
would put an estimated number of unique links I think we'll need to rank for this topic. From there, I'll decide whether it's worth
putting my time and resources into ranking. Now, it's just a matter of doing this for
all keywords that you're interested in targeting. And I highly recommend creating a spreadsheet
of some sort so that you can track of your keyword targeting plan. Alright, so by this point, we've gone through
most of the cookie-cutter keywords where search intent is easy to identify using keyword modifiers. But not all of the keywords are going to include
our seed keywords like "computer," "laptop," or "pc." A great way you can get more keyword ideas
is to reverse engineer the topics that are driving traffic to your competitors' websites. You can do this by going to Ahrefs Site Explorer. Just enter a competitor's domain and then
go to the Top pages report. Now, if I were looking for product pages that
I want to rank, I would search for a site like newegg.com that has a lot of product
page rankings. Or if I were looking for blog posts, I could
look at the Top pages report for a site like Tom's hardware. Now, it's just a matter of skimming the Traffic and Top keyword columns. And if you want to find lower competition
topics, then just look at the Referring Domains column to get a basic understanding of ranking
difficulty. Once you find a topic that you want to target,
then go through the same process of categorizing by search intent, assigning a business value,
and analyzing ranking difficulty. Getting traffic from keyword research is great
and all, but as you go through this process, you want to make sure that the keywords you're
targeting are serving your potential customers. And that's why it's so important to map keywords
to problems they face. You have the opportunity to showcase how your
products and services will make their life easier, and guide them towards your end goal. A conversion. Now, if you enjoyed this video, then make
sure to like, share, and subscribe, and if you have any questions on keyword research,
leave a comment below and I'd be happy to help. So keep grinding away, and I'll see you in
the next tutorial.
