Thanks Jake. So we built the layout from scratch so that our guides would be super easy to read and skim through. Brian this is great advice and content. Thanks for your help and advice. And the reason you gave this away for free is…jk. Kick ass guide Brian. Much more valuable than some of the paid guides.
Would be sweet if you could package this up into a printable PDF. Brian, I say this without any bias — every bit of content you provide is Gold. Argh the sharing toolbar is destroying the article on my iPad.
Would you consider offering your guides as single pages or pdfs? If on a single page, I can easily Pocket them to read offline. Thanks for considering! And if you using your phone then open the Chrome browser and you have to see three-dot at the top-right corner, click on that and you see the download button and click on that and download the amazing article.
Brian, you killed it again with this article. Keep up the awesome work and thank you so much! This is the best email in my inbox this morning! Great surprise. Shoulder keywords make for easy blog post ideas. I like this guide. Great job Brian. Hi Jennifer, happy to hear that. For sure: Shoulder keywords are kind of an underrated approach. And if your content impresses the pants off of people, you can turn that traffic into leads and sales. I am pretty certain I will be feasting on this article for days if not weeks to come!
Definitely something I was looking into. Thanks for another great, lengthy, informative and useful post Brian! In-depth guide about keywords research. Specially about the keywords to be chosen for new and old websites. Expanding on your keywords using Google Search Console has led us to driving double the amount of clicks so great info there.
Plus effective frequency in ranking in youtube, linkedin articles and other platforms is key because they drive referral traffic back to your page also and this massively helps ranking. Thanks James. No 3rd party tool can do that. I would like to add a tool for finding keyword difficulty — Kwfinder. I have been using this tool since the start of my career and I can say that it provides the most trustable data.
Thanks Himanshu. I actually have the Mangools suite on my tools that I need to check out. And my i ask I get nothing in email while im trying to join waiting list SEO Course via seothatworks. Re: the waiting list email. If you email support backlinko someone will look into that for you. Cheers Graham. Hey Grahman, thanks man!
I outline each one into discrete chunks. That way, everything it easy to read and skim. Absolutely great for beginner and expert. I really like your way of keyword research. Thanks for sharing. Hello sir, excellent article and it did showed me some new tips because I was struggling to find Keyword for a particular topic. Amazing, have you actually ever published something that did not look so wonderful.
Really you always make all my stuff look drab and boring. Although I have to do it myself, being small but hope to have good looking content like some day, when I am rich and famous like you. Thanks for all the help you give us. Hey Timothy, Thank you. Guides like this are a true team effort. But seriously, it takes a designer and talented developer to make our guides look as great as they do. I just write up a Google Doc and the team takes care of the rest.
Thanks for new updated keyword research guide for , and especially thanks for Wikipedia strategy. I usually find there keyword that I would never think of. Hi Melissa, thank you! I tried to make this guide super actionable outside of some of the background info in Chapter 1. Glad to hear that I hit the mark. I start to read your guide and keep reading word by words, this is an awesome piece of content and very helpful for me.
Thanks, Brian for such a brief but clear keyword research guide. I have a question regarding keyword research. For some keywords, I find a lot of business directories, review sites ranking, but the intent is clear commercial. Can I rank using those keywords? Because I do wonder how on earth you dig up these valuable details. Thanks Montfort. I talk more about that here.
This information is exactly what I am looking for to make my SEO more effective. There is so much information for me to digest. Thanks again. With guides like these, chunking is super important. Guess what? There is too much necessary work, strategy, and planning put into an effective SEO campaign to see quality results in days. Hell, even 90 days? In order to do so, an SEO campaign must research, strategize, plan, organize, develop, integrate, and implement a variety of tools and procedures that are distinct to your business before blue-ribbon results start waltzing through your door.
In those months, there is a wide range of services done to produce the kind of results you want to see. The first order of business in starting your SEO campaign is creating a strategy. Determining and setting realistic and timely goals is key for a smooth operating SEO campaign. If deadlines are consistently unmet, your business suffers in a multitude of ways.
So, ensure your business and those running your SEO campaign are meeting deadlines. Keyword research takes around 10 days to complete and moves into the development of keyword strategy. With these keyword discoveries, an SEO campaign assembles a keyword strategy to grow organic traffic towards your site. Following the keyword research, an on-site audit what we like to call a seo audit is next in line. Our battle audit takes two weeks to complete and another two weeks to implement.
How long does SEO take to see results? Those are often great starting points for keyword research. Download the Template. This template is designed to help you do the same and bucket your keywords into topic clusters, analyze MSV, and inform your editorial calendar and strategy.
Like I said in the previous section, user intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google. Today, it's more important that your web page addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used. So, how does this affect the keyword research you do?
It's easy to take keywords for face value, and unfortunately, keywords can have many different meanings beneath the surface. Because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra-careful how you interpret the keywords you target. Let's say, for example, you're researching the keyword "how to start a blog" for an article you want to create.
Does the searcher want to learn how to start an individual blog post? Or do they want to know how to actually launch a website domain for the purposes of blogging? If your content strategy is only targeting people interested in the latter, you'll need to make sure of the keyword's intent before committing to it. To verify what a user's intent is in a keyword, it's a good idea to simply enter this keyword into a search engine yourself, and see what types of results come up.
Make sure the type of content Google is closely related to what you'd intend to create for the keyword. This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it's a great way to fill out those lists. If you're struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google.
When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google's results, you'll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration. Want a bonus? Type in some of those related search terms and look at their related search terms.
Keyword research and SEO tools such as Ahrefs , SEMrush , and Ubersuggest can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you've generated up to this point. This exercise might give you alternatives that you might not have considered. Once you have an idea of the keywords that you want to rank for, now it's time to refine your list based on the best ones for your strategy.
Here's how:. Before choosing keywords and expecting your content to rank for them, you must curate keywords for three things:. Google ranks content for relevance. This is where the concept of search intent comes in.
Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers' needs. In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query. After all, why would Google rank your content higher if it provides less value than other content that exists on the web? Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative. That means you must do all you can to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, information content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks.
If you're not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword's SERPs are loaded with heavy sources you can't compete with like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic , you have a lower chance of ranking unless your content is exceptional. You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site.
Kind of like setting up shop in a ghost town. Volume is measured by MSV monthly search volume , which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences. If you don't know the difference between head terms and long-tail keywords, let me explain. Head terms are keywords phrases that are generally shorter and more generic -- they're typically just one to three words in length, depending on who you talk to.
Content angle is the main selling point of the content. That last point is a particularly important one. While search volume, traffic potential, difficulty, and search intent are all important considerations, you also need to consider what traffic from that keyword will be worth to your business. Conventional wisdom says that the earlier people are in their journey, the less likely they are to buy. How do people do this? That is what direct response copywriters are known for.
They create one ad that takes the reader from barely understanding their problem to buying your solution. It depends on how you look at it. Third , some marketers broaden their definition of TOFU to such a degree that they end up covering unrelated topics. Case in point, Hubspot:.
And this is based mainly on how well we can pitch our product in our content. By pairing this score with the estimated search traffic potential of a topic, we can get a good idea of the most valuable topics for our business. Focusing only on low-difficulty keywords is a mistake that a lot of website owners make. You should always have short, medium, and long-term ranking goals. Think of it like this: picking low-hanging fruit is easy, but those at the top of the tree are often juicier.
You should still pick them. But you should also plan ahead and buy a ladder for the ones at the top now. For checking the top 1, keywords you already rank for and how much traffic those keywords send you. For checking all the keywords you currently rank for, along with their estimated search volumes, Keyword Difficulty scores, traffic potential, and other useful SEO metrics. Find tens of thousands of keyword ideas in seconds, filter the keyword ideas reports for keywords that matter to you, and assess their traffic potential and ranking difficulty with ease.
Everything above should be enough to understand the basic concepts of keyword research and plan your content strategy. If you want to learn more and dig deeper into keyword research, check our links to further reading scattered throughout the guide. These will give you a much deeper understanding of the metrics and tools available and how to use them. You might also want to watch this video , where we walk you through the entire process from start-to-finish.
Feel that we missed something? Ping me on Twitter. Tim Soulo. Tim is the CMO at Ahrefs. Article stats Monthly traffic 5, Linking websites 1, Tweets The number of times this article was shared on Twitter.
Share this article. Keywords are the foundation of SEO. Monthly search traffic to the Ahrefs blog. This is chapter 3 in the. Did you know that most keywords are long-tail keywords? How to Find and Use Them.
Example of an ecommerce category page.
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