Keyword research is essential to almost all functions online whether you are looking for information or you are the one providing information. Information providers are bloggers, website owners, and online marketers and they make use of keywords to increase their rankings in search engines and improve the user experience. We can say that users and search engine relies on keywords to find your site.
Choosing the right keywords to optimize your content is not that easy, though. You need to know what people are looking for and what words they are most likely to type in the search box so that you can match it with your content.
This is pretty much analogous to book subject headings used by libraries to classify them for online public access catalogs.
You cannot start writing your content without the right keywords. Keyword research is the foundation on which your content should revolve around. Without a clear target of what words to use for optimization, it would be useless to start writing your content.
HOW TO FIND KEYWORDS
The first thing you need to do to find keywords is by making a list of all keywords that you think are relevant to your site. Keyword selection is easy if you are clear with about what your niche is and what you want to achieve with your site.
Once you have a list of potential keywords, checkout which ones are popular by using the Google Suggest feature which is integrated to Google Search. You may have noticed that once you start typing words in the search box, a drop-down shows a list of suggested keywords. This is Google Suggest, and the keywords that appear are the keywords that you should use for your content.
UNDERSTANDING KEYWORDS
Broad keywords are not effective for optimization. Always focus on long tail keywords or specific phrases to ensure that you will get qualified traffic. If you are selling ‘frozen flavored bananas, ‘ and your keyword is only ‘banana,’ you can get people who are just looking for plain bananas included in your traffic. This then is low-quality traffic because they basically will not find your site relevant.
Aside from the length of your keyword phrases, you also need to look for low competition keywords. High competition keywords are those that most of your competitors are using. If you were to rely on the same keywords, then you shouldn’t hope for higher rankings.
KNOWING YOUR COMPETITORS
To get a better grasp of what keywords to use, you also need to understand what keywords your competitors are using. Scanning your competitor’s pages and checking out the keywords that they are targeting is a good way to determine which keywords have high competition. Pick the long-tailed version of the keywords that you find to improve on the keywords that your competitors are using.
HOW TO LOOK FOR KEYWORDS THE EASY WAY
The strategies mentioned above all seem like a lot of work, and if you are running a business or handling several websites, you do not have the luxury of time to look for keywords manually. This is where research tools come in. There are a lot of keyword research tools available on the market, and the thing is they only focus on keywords.
When I needed to find new SEO and keyword research tools right after Google Panda hit my site, I wanted a platform that offers analytics reports that I can rely on. I also wanted a tool that could help me get a deeper understanding of my competitors, know what long tail keywords I needed to use and check which posts are contributing to my rankings.
SEMrush offers all of these features and more.
WHAT IS SEMrush?
SEM stands for search engine marketing. Though I primarily use SEMrush for its keyword research function, if offers a lot of other features that help me increase my rankings.
Organic Research
You can start using the right keywords by knowing first what the competitor’s keywords are. With SEMrush Organic Research data, you can get a deeper understanding of your competitor’s keyword rankings. You can also estimate the value of keywords by checking out performance indicators like traffic, search volume, competition, CPC, search results numbers and more.
What I find most useful about this feature is that I can check out the landing pages displayed in search engine page results for every given keyword that my competitors use. With the knowledge that I get, I figure out new ideas for optimization.
Other benefits that I get from the organic research features of SEMrush are the Competitive Positioning Map that helps me instantly understand my direct competitors’ performance based on their natural traffic and number of organic keywords and the Organic Competitors report that help me discover new organic competitors.
Advertising Research
With the SEMrush Advertising Research Feature, you can get a deeper look into the results of your competitor’s PPC investments. With valuable data on the PPC marketing activities of your competitors, you can have a better idea of their budgets, best keywords, AdWords and Bing Ads user trends and their most profitable ad copies. By knowing which worked and which not for your competitors, you have the luxury of not repeating their mistakes.
Display Advertising
With SEMrush data, you can enhance your success in display advertising. Through the data that you acquire, you can see top publishers and advertisers, analyze relevant data from their text, media ads, and landing pages to formulate ideas for your site and improve your display ads.
What I like best about the display advertising features of SEMrush is that I can analyze my competitor’s ad headlines, sub headlines, images, design, and calls to action. With the data that I get, I have an idea on how stable an ad is in generating conversions.
The SEMrush display advertising feature lets you see statistics based on which device your ad is displayed. Knowing this allows you to tweak your ads per device(which SEMrush also allows), analyze which text ads or media banners are working for each device and adjust display campaign settings for better user engagement
Backlinks
This feature is a powerful website backlink checker which lets you conduct link audits. SEMrush shows you the links that are pointing to your website to help you acquire information like incoming links, the authority of a referring domain, anchor texts, and URLs and titles of linking and target pages.
With a deeper analysis of backlinks, you can work on and improve your backlink strategies for better link building.
Video Advertising Research
SEMrush lets you create effective video ad campaigns by uncovering your competitor’s video ad strategies. With a detailed summary of your competitor’s in-stream video ads and data on how successful their campaigns are, you can learn from their mistakes and best practices and make better video ads.
Keyword Research
Find the best keywords for your SEO and PPC campaigns with the SEMrush Keyword Research Feature. Through this feature, you can get tried and tested keywords to get to the top of Google and Bing search results. You can also discover what your competitors and the big players are using for keywords.
Using low competition long tail keywords generated by the keyword research feature of SEMrush, you can attract more traffic and get better rankings in SERPs.
WHO SHOULD USE SEMRUSH?
SEMrush can be used by a lot of different sites. Whether you are maintaining a personal blog, a corporate website, an online shop for your merchandise or you are maintaining several blogs or sites as an online marketer; you can benefit from using keywords to generate more organic traffic. SEMrush works to identify different trends as well as the performance of your competitors and the big players in your niche.
Anyone who aims to have optimized content and high volumes of qualified traffic, SEMrush will work greatly to meet common goals.
MAIN BENEFITS
SEMrush does more than just looking for profitable keywords. It looks deep into the performance of your competition to help you create better content. Here are the main benefits of using SEMrush
Dive deep into your Competitor’s Performance – You have to understand that your site is not unique and there are many others like it. It is important to know how your competition is performing, what their pitfalls are as well as their successes. It is as simple as targeting the same traffic generating keywords that your competitors are using.
Better Advertising Opportunities – With SEMrush, you can launch better video ad campaigns and other display advertising campaigns. Analyze relevant data from your competitor’s text and images as well as videos and check out from the reports which ones are working and which ones are not. This way, you do not get to repeat your competitor’s mistakes and can develop further whatever they have seemed to accomplish
Keep Track of your Rankings – Analyze historical data and get to see various trends that are happening across all areas of your site. Stop assuming on which keywords or content worked in the past by actually seeing how each campaign or style has worked.
PRICING
There are various plans and prices depending on your needs. Check them out here.
