{"id":8513,"date":"2018-10-10T10:41:58","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T10:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.seoreviewtools.com\/?p=8513"},"modified":"2020-04-03T09:24:59","modified_gmt":"2020-04-03T09:24:59","slug":"keyword-research-with-ahrefs-the-comprehensive-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.seoreviewtools.com\/keyword-research-with-ahrefs-the-comprehensive-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Keyword Research with Ahrefs: The Comprehensive Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ranking for the right keywords is impossible without thorough and on-point keyword research.<\/p>\n

Think of yourself as a captain, your site is your ship, and keyword research is your map. Whether you are going to get stranded or find a treasure depends a lot on how you use that map.<\/p>\n

Powered by Big Data, Ahrefs is a prominent all-in-one SEO toolkit that can dispel all your doubts and concerns about your marketing campaign and finally move the needle.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So, if you don\u2019t have an Ahrefs account yet, you can try us with a 7-day trial for $7<\/a>. With that option, you will have access to both Lite<\/strong> and Standard<\/strong> plans without any additional limitations.<\/p>\n

And the trial is more than enough to unleash Ahrefs\u2019 potential and put its features to use. Some of the things you can do with Ahrefs include: competitor analysis, backlink analysis, rank tracking, link building, site audit, and, of course, keyword research.<\/p>\n

Without further ado, let\u2019s get started with an actionable SEO tutorial for keyword research with Ahrefs.<\/p>\n

I. Assess your site<\/h2>\n

To have a better idea of what you are going to work with, go to Site Explorer<\/a>, type in your domain name and go to Organic Keywords<\/strong> report. It will show you all the keywords your site is already ranking for on Google. This is a great way to see what route your business is going as well as to find underperforming pages that deserve your attention.<\/p>\n

Feel free to sort the keywords by position, search volume, etc. Your goal here is to get to know your site and figure out what you should focus on in the future.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an example of what you will see:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Also, don\u2019t get upset if this page is empty for you. For those who just started off not ranking for anything is absolutely normal. In this case, you can proceed to the next section in this guide.<\/p>\n

But if you do rank for some queries, go to Top pages<\/strong> report in the left sidebar that shows the pages that bring the most traffic to your site. Next, to the traffic estimate, you will see its percentage, estimated value, and the keywords the page is ranking for.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once you are done checking your current keywords, you might want to go back to the Overview page and look at Organic Traffic number. It\u2019s an estimate of the traffic your site gets from search results. Hence, it\u2019s based on the keywords you rank for.<\/p>\n

That figure can somewhat vary from what you could see in Google Analytics<\/strong>, but it\u2019s an estimate after all. Nonetheless, this metric is indispensable for comparing websites. It\u2019s the fastest way to see who performs better keywords-wise. So keep that in mind when you study your competition in the next step.<\/p>\n

II. X-ray your competitors<\/h2>\n

Competitor analysis must always be a huge part of your SEO work. Know your enemy, as the saying goes. Alright, they are more of your opponents. But it still holds.<\/p>\n

You do need to have a clear idea of what they are doing and what you should do to outplay them.<\/p>\n

The first rule that you need to learn is that if something works for your competition, chances are it will work for you as well. So, when analyzing other websites, pay attention to who links to them, what kind of keywords they target, etc.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s especially handy if you don\u2019t have any concrete strategy at the moment.<\/p>\n

So, one way to go is to open Competing domains<\/strong> report that gives a list of your top competitors along with a keywords comparison table. There, you can see how many unique and common keywords those domains have in relation to you.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a peek at the first competitor\u2019s organic keywords, like jansport.com<\/strong> that comes first on the list. And this is where the fun begins.<\/p>\n

As it\u2019s a famous brand, their site is ranking for roughly 80k keywords in all countries. Too many to look through manually. So, we would need to apply some filters magic.<\/p>\n

First, exclude all keywords that contain their brand name \u201cjansport<\/strong>\u201d. And just like that, we left out a good 16k keywords for the US only.<\/p>\n

Note, it can be an optional step if you re-sell this very brand\u2019s products.<\/em><\/p>\n

Next, filter the keywords by the amount of traffic they bring to the site:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These traffic numbers are helpful in finding out what people are interested in when looking for a particular product. The top query on our list is \u201claptop backpack\u201d<\/strong> which means that it\u2019s probably quite popular and generates a considerable amount of traffic.<\/p>\n

Take some time to sniff through these keywords and cherry pick the ones that are related to your business. For example, if you don\u2019t have any backpacks for children, there is no use in targeting those keywords.<\/p>\n

Build your own list of keywords that you want to dig into deeper. Those will serve you as seed keywords, or a starting point, for your further research.<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019re finished selecting, run a manual search for your keywords on Google and see what comes up on the results page. Just to find out what kind of content helps to rank for this or that keyword.<\/p>\n

Obviously, you are very unlikely to rank for such weighty keywords like \u201claptop backpacks\u201d right away. You need to go beyond that and find a more sophisticated way of choosing keywords.<\/p>\n

III. Picking the right keywords<\/h2>\n

An informed decision on whether some keyword is a perfect match for you needs to be based on the data and numbers behind that keyword. And you need to know how to make sense of them.<\/p>\n

At Ahrefs, Advanced metrics<\/strong> represent the essence of every keyword. They deliver the most important information and are great indicators in keyword research.<\/p>\n

The first metrics on our list is, of course, search volume<\/strong>. Search volume stands for monthly searches of a specific keyword. Basically, how often people google for something.<\/p>\n

As a little side note, search volume can be dependent on seasonality. For example, \u201clast christmas song\u201d is searched a lot more end November and during the winter holidays, so is \u201ccoats\u201d, etc.<\/p>\n

I think you will agree that it\u2019s pretty straightforward. But not really.<\/p>\n

The thing is, ever since Google seized to be a list of plain search result links and introduced Featured Snippets<\/strong>, SEOs realized that they need to take a different perspective on keyword research. And the fact that sites rank for highly competitive keywords doesn\u2019t really mean that they actually get a lot of organic traffic from them.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where Clicks <\/strong>come into play. If the number of clicks is low, it probably means that the answers to the search query are already shown on the results page. Images, knowledge card, you name it.<\/p>\n

These two graphs below show the statistics for \u201cdr martens\u201d term in the US. Not only can you see the percentage of clicks to the total searches, but also how many clicks the ads get.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So, 0.94 clicks per search<\/strong> sounds great, but nearly half of them go to the ads. Which is quite a big share if you ask me.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a red flag that this keyword is highly competitive, and you should find something more realistic.<\/p>\n

So, what do you do here? Luckily, you can resort to keyword ideas reports that are just the thing for you if you are looking for related but less ambitious keywords.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a brief overview of those ideas:<\/p>\n