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Not sure how to find profitable keywords? Here's how to do keyword research like an SEO professional, even if you don't know anything about SEO.
Let's start at the beginning. Let's first define the term “keyword research.”
Finding popular search terms and using them on your web pages to improve site traffic is how I define the term keyword search. It increases your organic traffic if you focus on finding the “right keywords” for your websites.
If you can't find profitable keywords, you won't be able to drive targeted traffic to your websites. If you don't get search traffic, you won't be able to make money with your blogs. Keyword research is directly proportional to the money you earn. It's as simple as that!
Keyword research includes a few important factors:
It shows us how difficult it will be for a few keywords to rank in search results. The higher the competition, the more difficult it will be to rank for a keyword. Try to focus on <1000 average monthly searches if you want to rank high in Google search results.
The number of times your keyword appears on your web pages, articles, or videos is simply called keyword density. Google considers the repeated use of the same keywords to be spam. Generally, you can use your main keywords every 200 words. It's even better to use “relevant keywords” for your primary keyword ideas to get more traffic from Google search results.
Long-tail keywords are those that are generally more specific and consist of 2 to 3 words. We'll talk more about long-tail keywords in this article.
Why is keyword research so important?
It's what defines the volume and type of traffic you get from search engines.
Regardless of what keyword you want to rank for, you need to do the right keyword research analysis to attract the right kind of visitors to your blog posts.
As a blogger deciding your niche, you can write about anything you want. Crossfit exercises, dog training, barbecue grilling, golf, camping, financial services, how Jeffrey Epstein didn't commit suicide, how to deal with your mother-in-law - just about anything you can imagine.
And when you've finally decided on your niche, you need to come up with blog post ideas — maybe five at first to launch your blog, then 10, and maybe even up to 100+ blog posts if you're consistent.
So what the hell are you writing about?
How do you avoid the common mistake of “doing” keyword research without thinking about monetization?
As you know, I am for blogging to be a business and for making money to be the number one priority.
To make money, you need to know the intention to buy.
In other words, the amount of money you can earn with a keyword - that's the transaction value.
Here is how I summarize the situation:
Bloggers need to find keywords that have purchase intent and affiliate revenue potential.
The good news is that they are very easy to find.
When you think about it, websites can only make money in four different ways:
Any online business sells either their own product, someone else's product, their time, or your eyes.
That is all.
And remember, when it comes to keyword research, we're talking specifically about bringing people to your website from a Google search. Not from social media, not by clicking between pages on your site, just from Google.
And with Google, the advantage is that we understand search intent, that is, the meaning of the search. We can plan our blog posts around the transactional keywords that people are looking for when they're looking for something to buy.
That's why your main monetization goal for keyword research should be transactional affiliate marketing keywords.
Here's why it's the best form of keyword monetization:
So if affiliate marketing is the best form of monetizing a blog, what are you writing about?
Finding what your audience types on Google can be helpful when researching keywords. Internet users usually ask questions before they buy something online. You can use the keywords in the FAQ as long-tail keywords to incorporate into your content marketing strategy.
So how do you find the questions your target audience is looking for?
The best way is to use Quora, the best question and answer platform where millions of people from around the world meet online to ask questions and get quality answers.
Here's what a sample FAQ looks like;
When you type in a question like “what are the best stocks to buy” on Quora, not only does the site offer you very useful answers from experts, but it also displays related questions in the sidebar, as you can see in the image above.
So if you want to use the FAQ keyword research to find high-quality keywords based on questions, Quora is the best place.
You can also use Google Search to quickly find FAQ keywords. Here's what that looks like;
As you can see above, Google shows “People also ask” questions for the keyword “keyword stuffing.” When you click on one of them, Google gives you even more lists of questions that people ask in searches.
All of this data can be very useful in coming up with LSI keyword ideas and long-tail keyword phrases to improve organic traffic to your blog.
Did you know that you can use Google Trends to search for keywords? Yes, Google Trends is one of the underrated tools that can offer you great perspectives on any topic you want to cover.
Here's how it works;
From the illustration above, you can see that nutrition is getting a lot more interest over time in Google than SEO. You can also add other topics to compare to find out what the audience is interested in.
Go to Google Trends and follow these simple steps to do keyword research.
That's all! It will show you all the data you need based on your search.
Recommended: How do I use Google Trends?
One of the quickest ways to find successful keywords is to do a competitive analysis. You should always have a list of 10 to 15 of the top blogs in your industry. So you can use these sites to get a ton of blog post ideas as well as keyword ideas.
Make sure you find a list of the blog posts that get the most traffic as well as the posts that generate the most profit for your competitors' sites. That way, you can also consider creating 10x better content around the same topics to be able to generate more search traffic and sales.
We highly recommend that you try tools like Semrush or its alternatives to research the competition, as these two tools help you find it easily;
Take a look at the screenshot below to see how competitive analysis works on Semrush.
As you can see above, Semrush gives you a list of all the top organic competitors when you enter any URL into the dashboard and you can easily find a list of common keywords, search engine keywords as well as a list of competing websites.
The best way to find profitable keywords is to assess their cost and value at the CPC. While there are plenty of tools for finding the CPC value of a keyword, we highly recommend trying Semrush as it provides a ton of information, including the following.
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If I had to choose only one SEO tool, I would choose Semrush. Note that, I've been a long time happy user of the Semrush tool, but it helped me increase my search traffic by 15% in just 30 days.
Semrush is much more than a keyword research tool, but I'm not going to talk about its other features in detail, because instead, we're going to talk about how it will help you find the most profitable keywords for any niche.
If you are wondering what Semrush is, let me explain it briefly.
If you want to spy on your competitors' top-performing keywords and learn about their best link building strategies, Semrush is for you.
You may be asking yourself “why should I focus on my competitors?”
The reason is simple: if you want to get the best search results for a keyword you're targeting, you first need to know who currently ranks at the top of Google.
Once you know their top keywords that get more traffic and the inbound links they get, it becomes easy for you to outrank them.
That's where Semrush comes in. It allows you to spy on and crush your competitors, no matter what niche you are in.
I know that the majority of bloggers use Google's keyword planner (which is a free tool that anyone can use), but the only problem is that even if you find keywords that are not very competitive, there is a lot of competition for them because everyone uses the same tool.
To get rid of this problem and really discover the hidden keywords that help you increase your website traffic, you need to find a few other ways.
I highly recommend that you try Semrush, a fantastic tool that gives you details about search volume, number of competing pages, average cost per click, related keywords, and more.
It is surely 100% better than Keyword Planner. Here's how to use it to do better keyword research.
For example, if I want to rank for the keyword “WordPress tutorial,” here's how I can use Semrush to find really good keywords that actually help me increase traffic.
In the screenshot above, you'll notice that Semrush gives you monthly search visits for the keyword you're entering. You can also choose the database for the country you are targeting.
On the same page, Semrush also provides you with a list of all the keyword ideas that are relevant to your main keyword. See screenshot below.
You see! Instead of trying to rank for your targeted keyword “WordPress tutorials” that has a monthly search volume of around 10,000, by focusing on the keyword “WordPress tutorial” (with 880 monthly visits), you are sure to get more search traffic. That's how you should do your keyword research.
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They say content is king. That's really true, but have you ever wondered why your blog isn't getting any search traffic, even if you're publishing quality articles?
Maybe it's because you're not using long-tail keywords in your content. If you are wondering what they are, here is a simple example.
Anyone (even if you have a new blog) can rank higher in search results by using “long-tail keywords.” But the only problem is how do you find them without hiring an SEO expert who charges you thousands of dollars?
Long Tail Pro comes in two versions: one is the basic tool (sufficient for most bloggers) and the other is Long Tail Platinum (an advanced version that allows you to control keyword research campaigns).
You can get Long Tail Pro for only $27/month.
Here is the simple tutorial.
Step 1 : After downloading the Long Tail Pro tool, to find the best keywords, you must first start a new project by clicking on the “+” in the upper left corner. Then, simply name your project and select the option you want in the new project window.
Step 2 : Now add the starting keywords. You'll get the result with details including “local searches”, and average CPC. Choose the best keyword that has low competition and a better “Avg KC” (Keyword Competitiveness).
Step 3 : Focus primarily on finding long-tail keywords with 3 words or more for better results (note: be sure to choose keywords that are under KC 40).
While there are many, the best use of this tool is that it allows you to find long-tail keywords that can be generated from a starting keyword or phrase. It's extremely useful if you're stuck somewhere and don't know what long-tail keywords to use in your content creation.
In case you are wondering what this tool offers, here are a few benefits of using it.
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The only downside to using Google's keyword planner is that almost every other blogger in your industry is already using it.
Even if you find keywords that are less competitive, they're still used by most other bloggers in your niche, leading to increased competition and it's hard to rank higher.
That's where Keywordtool.io comes to the rescue, it's the BEST alternative to the keyword planner.
Not only does it give you keyword ideas that are not provided by Keyword Planner, but it also helps you easily optimize your articles with long-tail keyword phrases.
Step 1 : Go to Keywordtool.io and enter your favorite keywords (it's free!)
Step 2 : Now choose long-tail keywords with more than 3 words. You can use all of them in your blog posts or web pages to rank higher! (Note: You can use tools like Semrush to find out the competition and monthly searches for the keywords you find on this tool).
For example, let's say you want to know the monthly searches for the keyword “best SEO tools free”, here is the Semrush search result.
Ok, wait... but what about Google's keyword planner?
Here are a few more reasons why Google Keyword Planner isn't the right option for you.
Ubersuggest is the SEO tool managed by the expert himself Neil Patel. Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool that you can use to easily find a ton of useful keyword ideas to get more traffic and sales.
Here's what it looks like;
As you can see above, immediately after entering the keyword of your choice (e.g. marketing), Ubersuggest gives you a ton of keyword ideas as well as the following metrics.
You can also click on the other “Related” tab to find a list of keyword phrases that are highly relevant to your target keyword.
Also read: Ubersuggest vs Semrush: Comparison
KW Finder is one of the best keyword tools if you're looking for accurate keyword data. Unlike other premium SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs - KW Finder also offers you free limitations for each registered user (up to 5 keyword searches per day), making it a great tool even for beginners.
Here's what it looks like;
Here are some of the metrics you can find in KW Finder that can be very useful when extracting successful keywords.
We'll start with Google's keyword planner because not only is it free, but it's also widely used by the majority of bloggers to do keyword research.
Google's keyword planner is perhaps the best free keyword research tool for finding profitable keywords for your websites. Simply create an account in Google Adwords and you'll be able to use the free keyword planning tool to start finding keywords for any topic.
Here are some of the benefits of using the Keyword Planner tool;
Here's how to search for keywords using Google's keyword planner.
Now let's get into the details of how to use Google Keyword Planner. Open your Google Keyword Planner tool and follow the step-by-step process mentioned below.
Step 1 : Click “Search for new keywords and ad group ideas.”
Step 2 : Now enter the keywords you are targeting.
Always select keywords that are high-volume keywords that are less competitive.
In general, low-competition keywords are those that receive a sufficient number of monthly searches but are easy to rank for, unlike high-competition keywords that are nearly impossible to rank for unless you are a brand and have a high SEO budget.
Here's the rule of thumb for using Google's keyword planner:
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To launch and manage a successful blog, you only need two types of articles:
That is all. You could start a successful multi-million dollar blog with just these two types of posts.
Remember, when doing keyword research, you need to find keywords that can generate revenue. One point that's all. Otherwise, you're ranking for random keywords that can't be monetized or that only generate low ad revenue.
It's one of the biggest mistakes newbie bloggers make. They write their first 10 articles, but none of them have transaction value, and so they wonder why they're not making money.
Product reviews are transactional research that directly generates affiliate revenue. How-to guides are informative searches that generate lots of traffic, build trust, and expand your email list for future sales.
Here's why those are the only two types of articles you need (and how easy it is to search for keywords).
Bloggers should first perform a keyword search by finding terms related to products in their niche. These are keywords that people search for product reviews for and that usually contain the word “best.”
Their search intent is transactional.
For example, if you Google “the best credit card,” look at what you see:
All of the top ranked sites are affiliated — Nerd Wallet, Bankrate, Creditcards.com, USNews, and WalletHub. There is no Visa, Capital One, Chase, or other banking institution.
It's dominated by affiliates.
And these affiliates earn money every time a person signs up for a credit card through one of their affiliate links.
Let's look at another research looking at the “best running shoes”:
Again, we see Runner's World, Fleet Feet, and Running Shoes Guru. There is no mention of Nike, Adidas, Brooks, or other racing brands.
We see bloggers dominating. Growth Marketing Pro, your servant, G2 (a popular review site), GoToMeeting (the first real brand), then Capterra, another review blog.
Why?
Internet users looking for product categories are looking for reviews from trustworthy third parties. For these searches, they're not ready to be directed directly to a brand's product page — they want in-depth information from a blog first.
For example, if they want to go directly to a product page, they will look for the exact product, that is, “Brooks Adrenaline GTS 20", because they've already done their research and know what the product is (and probably first read about it on a blog).
Extra tip: The goal over time is to rank for the keyword that includes the word “best,” and then eventually rank for the keyword itself without “best.”
For example, in the case of “best running shoes,” Runner's World ranks first. However, it also ranks first for “running shoes,” which has a higher search volume. Try looking for products without “best” ones, like credit cards, webinar software, men's boots, etc. Here, you see more real e-commerce brands on page 1, but there are still a lot of affiliates competing quite often.
Start with “best,” get links to your content, and you may eventually be able to rank for the main term itself without “best.”
When I was an affiliate manager, someone smart once said this to me:
Affiliates are like an indirect sales team.
Find products that are sold in your niche and that you can rank (and sell) for. Then, you can outperform the brands themselves and get a share of their profits.
For example, even though Nike is ranked on page 1 for “running shoes,” it can't rank in the top 10 Google search results. They need to work with other websites to get their message out there. That's where affiliate relationships come in.
It's my favorite form of blog monetization and a way to earn over $70,000 per month. It's the ultimate way to use your personal brand to take back your power.
The best way to find the revenue potential of keywords is to use theAhrefs Keyword Explorer tool. It's the tool I use to find new keyword ideas.
For example, let's say golf is your niche.
Go to the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and type in “best golf.”
Now, “best golf” doesn't make much sense and only has 150 monthly searches.
However, when you click the “Have the same terms” button on the left, you can see all keyword variations that include “best golf” - that's where you find your transactional product keywords.
In this list, you get columns for the keyword, keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, estimated monthly clicks, CPC, and more.
Based on this search alone, take a look at all of the easy potential assessment jobs we've just found:
All of these products have good search volume and low competition. By doing a quick search with Ahrefs, we just got 11 new ideas for blog posts about product review.
Searching for keywords is easy. You just need to know what you're looking for.
Follow your instincts.
Honestly, that's what I do when it comes to affiliate marketing. There are a lot of factors to consider when promoting a brand and ranking products.
All of the following factors determine how much money you can earn by promoting an affiliate product:
That's a lot to take into account. And as a new blogger, it's nearly impossible to know which post will perform better than another.
That's why, if you start a blog and find keywords for product reviews, go for it.
Look for the 11 keywords above and don't plan too much. Just try to reach each product review and a few of them will stick around.
Bonus tip:
I try to stick to products that sell for a reasonable price (between $50 and $150), have strong brand recognition, and offer high commission rates. You can see some average commission rates by industry in My guide to the best high-paying affiliate programs.
Bonus tip 2:
You can also search for the term on Google, go to a competitor's site, and click on their affiliate links. A competitor's article recommendation #1 is usually the one that makes the most money, and you can click on this link and see the price of the product they recommend.
These transactional terms will make up the bulk of your income from affiliate marketing.
Think of it that way.
Let's say you publish an article: “13 Best Golf Bags of 2020 (Ranked and Reviewed).”
In this post, you rank 13 different golf bags with comprehensive reviews, pros, cons, and characteristics of each. Your first choice is the TaylorMade 2020 Supreme Cart golf bag.
Whenever you mention the brand, use an affiliate link and refer readers to their product page.
It could be an affiliate link Amazon Associates if the product is listed on Amazon It could also be a unique link that you get when you sign up for the TaylorMade affiliate program itself - it seems they have an affiliate program on Viglink - and pay 10% commissions on each sale.
Here's an example of what one of my product review articles looks like on the best website creation tools. You will notice that most of the brands mentioned have affiliate links:
In these lists, you should include at least three affiliate links per product/company. And include affiliate links for as many products as possible - all 13 if possible.
Making money with a blog is a numbers game. The more traffic you get on your articles and the more people click on your affiliate links, the more money you make.
For example, let's do a quick calculation exercise to find out how much money your article on “best golf bags” could make per month:
$500 per month in passive income, that's not bad at all for a single blog post about golf bags.
Here's why affiliate marketing is great:
If you were to monetize this page with ads (not affiliate links), you'd be lucky enough to get a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) of $10 or $25 per month. $500 compared to $25 is a 20x higher return for affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing has a much higher return on investment than ad networks.
It focuses your keyword research on the transactional keywords that matter.
That's why it's critical, when choosing your niche and coming up with content ideas, to write about things that people actually buy.
I cannot emphasize this enough.
When doing keyword research, don't just look at vanity indicators. Find keywords with purchase intent and affiliate revenue potential.
Don't just “do keyword research,” start by finding monetizable keywords based on the “best” product review keywords.
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A blog cannot live solely on product reviews. Sure, there are plenty of product review sites out there, but they lack personality. People don't just want to read product articles, they want information.
To make your blog a real brand with enthusiastic fans, you need to be a teacher and create an audience around the problems you help them solve.
How do you solve their problems?
With informative “how to” guides.
Take the example of a search for “how to create a blog”:
They are all affiliated bloggers who teach people how to start a blog.
And the process of starting a blog involves a lot of steps. There is planning, the selection of a niche, the signing of a contract oflodging, choosing a WordPress theme, writing content, and lots of other tasks that beginners need to learn.
How are these how-to items monetized?
In much the same way as for product articles.
These bloggers almost exclusively recommend web hosting companies like Bluehost and encourage readers to click on their affiliate links.
I too have an article on the starting a blog, but I'm trying to make this a very tactical article, which covers a lot more about planning and choosing a niche before going directly to web hosting - and I don't say the word Bluehost before the word 765 haha.
Ultimately, how-to guides are one of the main ways you as a blogger solve your audience's problems.
And the key is that you want to solve their problem with information, and a product as a solution.
You teach your readers how to do something by selling your own course or by selling someone else's products through affiliate marketing.
Let's go back to the golf example.
To find “how to” topics to write for your audience, use the same strategy as before with the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. Except this time, instead of typing “best golf,” type in “how to play golf.”
“How to golf” is a bit broad on its own, but again, click on the “Having same terms” link to see all keyword variations that include “How to golf.”
Again, we see a plethora of great how-to golf guide ideas:
Here are six more great article ideas for our imaginary golf blog.
Practical articles help create two very important elements: traffic and trust.
First, many people are looking for online tutorials and instructions. If you look at the search volume figures with the SEO tools, “how-to” articles get a lot of searches and can significantly increase your blog traffic.
Second, they build trust because you provide completely free information that demonstrates your expertise and helps your readers.
A Google searcher might find your blog after searching for “how to do a swing with a golf club,” then they might read your product reviews and click on an affiliate link, or they might join your mailing list and buy a course.
Review articles and how-to guides go hand in hand and are the two most important categories for bloggers.
Just look at how some of the most popular blogs are structured.
Nomadic Matt will teach you how to travel the world on a budget, but you may also need travel insurance, travel credit cards, one of its guides, or other products:
Yes, NerdWallet provides lots of useful how-to guides on investing and saving for retirement, but it makes most of its money with lists of credit card and loan products:
And going back to our golf example, you'll see that One Stroke Golf ranks for “how to rock a golf club,” but its menu directs readers to equipment and product reviews:
These three examples offer informative how-to guides to help their audience solve their problems and transactional product reviews showing which products they need.
It is very simple.
2. When you teach them how to solve their problem, you're providing them with a transactional product as a solution.
Keyword research shouldn't be a mystery; it's easy. All you need to do is find the keywords “product reviews” and “how to” in your industry and start writing.
In the end, ignore articles that simply tell you to “do keyword research” and instead find ways to generate a return on investment from the keywords you're targeting. Look for the keywords “best” and “how to do it.”
If you're starting a blog, write an article in each of these categories.
Let's say you're an amateur photographer and you want to start a photography blog to earn some extra money on the side.
Here's what the might look like The titles of your first four blog posts (with target keywords in bold):
Writing a few product reviews, how-to guides, and a creative article for fun is a great exercise and the perfect way to start your blogging journey.
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Now that we know there are two main types of blog posts to write (product reviews and how-to), let's go a step further.
In this paradigm, all blog posts will also be classified into one of the following four categories, based on keyword search volume and intent level:
I call it the keyword search matrix.
It's a simple calculation: For any keyword, the higher the search volume and the higher the search intent (transaction value), the more money you can make.
THEsearch intent is a user's main objective when conducting a search. As we saw earlier, research can be informative (how to handle a golf club) or transactional (the best putters for beginners).
Here are the four main categories your keywords should fall into:
Characteristics: High monthly search volume (over 5,000), high CPC (over $5), strong competition, high affiliate earning potential.
The combination of high volume and high search intent makes these keywords extremely valuable.
In other words, many people are looking for something and need a product to help them.
These are the keywords that all bloggers covet. They may be extremely competitive, but they should be part of your strategy if you are a serious blogger.
Main objective: affiliate income.
Characteristics: High monthly search volume (over 5,000), low CPC (under $5), medium competition, low affiliate earning potential.
The second type of keywords is that of brand creators. This is the category where most of your how-to guides fall into. These keywords are often searched for but do not offer a direct and easy path to affiliate income.
For example, one of these keywords is “how to make money online.”
Its volume is 296,000 monthly searches - a very high figure. However, the CPC is only $2, a lower value because the keyword is broad and difficult to monetize with a direct offer.
Search intent is hard to understand. People want to make money online in a variety of ways: taking online surveys, starting an e-commerce business, cutting coupons, investing... It is not clear.
Since “how to make money online” isn't directly monetizable with a clear product, brand-building keywords increase your traffic, position you as an expert in your niche, generate email signups, and direct readers to your other high-value-added blog posts.
Main objectives: Traffic, email list, course sales.
Characteristics: Low monthly search volume (under 5,000), high CPC (over $5), medium to high competition, medium to high affiliate earnings potential.
Rough diamonds are valuable keywords that are not searched very often. They can be very competitive with very high CPCs.
For example, look at the keyword “marketing automation software”:
This keyword is searched globally 4,000 times per month, a moderate figure. The measure that stands out here is the insanely high CPC of $50.
This means that brands that bid on PPC ads for this term pay around $50 for a single click. It is a valuable keyword to rank for. And I bet you there are a number of affiliate programs in this space.
Main objective: affiliate income.
Sometimes you have to throw the keyword search out of the window.
You are one of a kind and no one else can take that away from you. You need to highlight your unique voice, life experience, and expertise to help your audience in the best way possible. Get started. Be creative.
Most of the time, it has nothing to do with keyword research. Simply write an article to help, to share your life, to have fun, and to provide as much value as possible to your readers.
*The article you are reading now is an example.
These items won't get much (or not at all) traffic directly from Google. However, you highlight them on your content silos and category pages so that new readers find them, read them, and become die-hard fans.
Primary goals: Enthusiastic fans, course sales.
To summarize, just as there are two types of blog posts to write, each of your keywords will be classified into one of the following four categories.
How does all of this work in practice?
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We've covered a lot so far.
We've condensed keyword research for bloggers into two article types and four keyword categories. And we discovered the importance of finding transactional and informational keywords based on purchase intent.
Let's end this article by demystifying the difficulty of keywords so you can better understand what you can actually rank for.
When researching keywords, the standard measure that people look at is the keyword difficulty (KD).
SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz They may all call it slightly differently, but the idea is the same. This is a number from 0 to 100 based on the difficulty of ranking for a given keyword - 0 being the easiest and 100 being the most difficult.
Here's why I don't think it's a very good metric:
Ultimately, your keyword research should go beyond relying on a single number.
Here's what you really need to do:
It's pretty simple too.
To assess the competition for a given keyword, look at the Domain Rating (DR) and the URL Rating (UR) of the top ten pages of the ranking.
These are the Ahrefs metrics defined as follows:
A 93 DR site like Forbes is more likely to rank quickly for something than my blog with a current DR of 78. The reason is obvious: the site has more links and authority than my blog.
When you're a new blogger, your DR is zero. You can increase your DR in the range of 30 to 50 in 3 to 6 months if you work hard and get high-quality backlinks through invited articles and other link building efforts.
But DR is not everything.
If your DR is lower than a competitor's, you can always outperform it with better content.
New bloggers should always focus on developing the DR, as it helps to categorize all content over time.
However, the best metric for keyword research is URL evaluation (UR).
When you publish a new blog post, your post's new UR usually starts at 10. By getting more high-quality links to the individual article over time, the UR increases.
While the 80s and 90s are considered to be extremely high DRs, the 30s and 40s are considered to be high URs.
To find out if you can rank for a keyword, look at the difficulty score, but also the DR and UR of the top 10 results.
Here's how to dig deeper.
Let's say you have a blog about outdoor cooking. You write about how to smoke meat, sell helpful barbecue guides, and recommend grilling products and accessories.
You're looking for the keyword “grilling accessories” in the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer:
It seems to be a good keyword overall, from a metric perspective:
Sounds like an easy way to get traffic, right?
Not so fast.
When you dig deeper, scroll down, and see the top ten ranked sites, the competition seems stronger:
The top 10 sites in the ranking have domain ratings (DR) of 61, 95, 90, 67, 79, 91, 88, 83, and 62. Even if Ahrefs gives you a low difficulty score, you'll have to compete with Amazon, Home Depot, Weber, NBC News, Good Housekeeping, and Taste of Home.
There is not a single site with low DR in the top 10.
If you go to page 2, the news won't get any better — you'll need to upgrade Lowes, Overstock.com, NY Mag, Walmart, Crate and Barrel, and Target.
While you can probably make it to page 1 with a DR of 50 with very high quality content, the keyword is much more competitive than the keyword difficulty score of 13 would suggest.
On the other hand, what about a keyword that has a high difficulty score but might be easier to rank for?
Let's take the keyword “how to make money blogging”:
This one has an overall monthly search volume of 11,000 and seems more difficult to rank with a keyword difficulty score of 68.
However, the SERP overview tells a slightly different story.
The domain indexes (DR) for the top 10 sites are 78, 77, 89, 58, 64, 70, 88, 41, and 86. This time, two sites with low DR (41 and 58) are still classified on page 1.
Thus, from the perspective of domain rankings and competition, “how to make money blogging,” whose keyword difficulty is 68, seems easier to rank than “barbecue accessories,” whose keyword difficulty is 13.
While it's not that simple and evaluating URLs plays a role in ranking these individual messages, one thing is clear.
You need to take “keyword difficulty” with a grain of salt and look at real competition.
If you're a brand-new blogger, look for the following to give yourself the best chance of ranking:
To put it simply, you need to know who is on the front page.
Doing good keyword research is an art and it takes time to master. You can't find better keywords that increase your traffic right from the start. Once you start spending more time on it and playing with the keyword research tools mentioned in this guide, you'll learn how to rank for any keyword in Google's search results.
How to do keyword research may be the question that most people can't answer correctly. Finding buyer keywords for your articles, web pages, or videos is a difficult task, especially when you're new to search engine optimization. You should first strive to find the right type of keyword ideas for your entire site and make your site search engine friendly by optimizing it for those keywords.
Once you've analyzed your keywords, start focusing on writing quality content (nothing beats quality, you can't expect to get good results from Google by creating thin content) in order to boost your organic traffic. There's also a powerful way to increase your search traffic, which is attracting backlinks from other sites. The more links that point to your websites, the more authoritative your articles will be and can easily rank high in Google search results.
While there are plenty of keyword research tools available, I highly recommend starting your keyword research process using Google Keyword Planner. As this tool is one of the best keyword research tools that is also free to use. Not only can you find the best keywords, you can also analyze keyword competition to rank better in Google search results.
Always focus on using long-tail keywords when doing keyword research because they can give you low competition and more traffic. And it's easy to rank in the top results by focusing on long-tail keywords in your blog posts.
Once you've mastered using the Google Keyword Planner tool to do keyword research, you can start using advanced keyword research tools like HitTail, Moz, WordStream, Semrush, etc. to find the most profitable keywords for your niche.
As a general rule, NEVER write another article without doing proper keyword research. And focus on using high-volume, low-competition keywords to rank higher in Google search results for all of the keywords you use.
Please share this keyword research guide with friends if you find it helpful. Do you have more questions about how to do keyword research in 2022? If yes, please ask them in the comments section below and I will be happy to respond to your feedback.
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Keyword research helps you rank easily in search engines like Google. So you can bring more organic traffic to your websites or online stores in less time.
Here are a few other SEO benefits of keyword research.
Searching for keywords is not child's play. We have been doing keyword research for years and sometimes we still have trouble finding keywords with great potential. That being said, if you are a beginner who is new to keyword research, here are some major mistakes you should avoid to attract more search traffic.
We all know that long-tail keywords are easier to rank for due to their low competitiveness. But here's what it is. If you target long-tail keywords like “short phrases,” you won't get results (especially if you have a new website with a weak backlink profile or domain authority).
Here's what we mean by “long-tail keywords.”
Long-tail keywords can contain 3 words or more, but that doesn't mean you should target a 3-word long-tail keyword, as it's sure to have a lot more competition than a 5-word long-tail keyword.
Here are a few examples of short sentence long-tail keywords (which you should avoid).
As you can see above, all of the above sample keywords are short sentence keywords that are 3-word long tail keywords. And you can't compete for the terms above because you can't rank for them unless you have a ton of budget and quality backlinks.
Whether you know it or not, there are several types of keywords, including the following;
If you ignore commercial intent keywords and only focus on informative or navigational keywords, you will NEVER attract people who actually buy products from you.
Here are a few examples of commercial intent keywords, in case you're curious to know.
If you look at the examples above, these are all commercial keywords where people are actually looking for the “best deals” to buy online.
It's a HUGE mistake when looking for keywords. If you don't keep an eye on the competition for the keywords you're going to rank for, how can you even get into the top 10 in search results?
That being said, here are some keyword metrics you need to find to easily discover the competitiveness of any keyword you're trying to rank for.
Advice: install the Moz toolbar (available for free for Chrome) so you can easily discover PA, DA, and backlinks metrics when you search on Google on the go.
Not all keywords are the same. Some keywords have more value (over $10 CPC, cost per click) while others have a low CPC value (under $1 CPC).
So, if you're looking to attract high-potential keywords, you should also consider the value of a keyword. In other words, you should always keep an eye on the CPC to find highly profitable keywords.
That one keyword research error alone could cost you thousands of dollars in the long run. So be sure to give more importance to CPC when doing keyword research.
LSI keywords are essentially keywords that are related to the keyword you are looking for on search engines. In short, LSI keywords are the keywords that are related to your main term.
For example, “apple laptop” might be an LSI keyword for “Macbook air” or “Macbook pro.”
You can easily find a ton of LSI keywords using tools like
LSI keywords help Google better understand the relevance of your pages. A legitimate page about “Apple computers” will likely contain a set of other words related to Apple computers, such as “Apple phones,” “Apple iPhone 5,” “new Apple iPad,” “Apple stock prices,” etc. On the other hand, a page full of keywords about “Apple computers” will likely only contain that single keyword.
That's why Google has moved from the era of “keyword stuffing” to the era of “LSI indexing.” So be sure to find multiple LSI keywords when looking for a primary keyword to index for your website.
Here are a few free keyword research tools to get you started.
We highly recommend the following three paid keyword research tools for 2022.
There is no specific answer. But considering numerous surveys, we can say that it generally takes about a hundred days to be ranked for a keyword in Google. If a keyword has a really low search volume and keyword difficulty score, you can rank even within one day.
There are plenty of keyword research tools out there that allow you to easily find the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. Among them are SpyFu, Semrush, Ahrefs, etc.
Keyword mapping is the process of associating keywords with specific pages on a website, based on keyword research. Based on your mapping process, you can easily come up with incredible site recommendations to make your page more relevant to the mapped keywords.
Overall, keyword mapping helps you align highly relevant keywords to create useful and related pages on your site.
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The search engine optimization you once knew is dead and no longer exists. Now you need to follow a specific set of rules to outperform your competitors in search results for the keywords you want.
Without further ado, let's get into the details of how to conduct advanced keyword research in 2022.
Here is the 3-step formula I follow to find profitable keywords for my blog posts.
Now let's go into the details of the 3-step formula to do a proper keyword research.
Find ideas for keywords that are relevant and highly targeted to your niche. Here is the first rule of SEO: always bring targeted visitors to your web pages. You should get keyword suggestions first before you think about increasing your organic traffic.
The first step in increasing your search traffic is keyword research. Find profitable keywords that improve your overall search engine rankings.
Once you have a list of keywords for your next articles, you can then start evaluating them to analyze your keyword competition. It's always best to target keywords with less competition, especially when your website is new.
Once you've evaluated keyword competition, develop your desired keywords into long-tail keywords. Before doing keyword research, be sure to use long-tail keywords. Here's what I mean.
I hope you understood what I meant. The next time you do keyword research, be sure to enter long-tail keywords to increase your organic traffic.
Here's also why long-tail keywords tend to bring you more organic traffic.
Can you see how your website's click-through rate could increase with the use of long-tail keywords? That's why you need to start using “long-tail keywords” when doing your keyword research.
