Keywords are an important aspect that helps your content to get the top position on the first page of the search engine.
Getting the right keywords for your content according to the website niche is one of the complicated processes of SEO. Making it unique with low competition and high volume is the perfect solution.
There are hundreds of tools available in the market for keyword search, which have a lot of features at their plan level.
In this, Semrush is one of the most popular tools for keyword research among all SEO in the world. I personally find it extremely user-friendly because semrush provides a wide range of options () for searching for the right keyword.
This guide will help you learn how to use the full potential of the Semrush for keyword research.
Semrush has these three key of features that you can use for keyword research:
- Keyword overview
- Keyword gap
- Keyword magic tool (specific features of Semrush)
Make sure you have a Semrush activated account before you get started.
If you don’t have an account yet, I recommend you to sign up for a 7-day free trial of Semrush Pro by clicking the link below.
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Semeush Keyword’s Overview Report
Keyword Overview is the top-level first option for viewing reports for any keyword in the Semrush. After entering a keyword or phrase in the search bar will see the amount of keywords (globally and nationally), intent, number of results, CPC, competition level, trend and more here.
The important thing is that you will find here a quick summary of important keyword metrics around your main keywords.
You have to pay special attention to these five keyword metrics:
- Search volume
- Keyword difficulty
- CPC
- Trend
- SERP Ana
So let’s look at each of these metrics more closely:
Search Volume
Search volume for a specific keyword refers to the number of times it is searched in a particular country or globally each month. For example, the keyword ‘best mobile’ has a monthly search volume of 49.5k in India and a global search volume of these keywords is 75.7k.
Professional SEO marketers look at the average volume of search terms over predetermined periods to find out how popular and competitive the keywords are.
This information will guide their strategy as to which keywords are more likely to drive traffic.
Before choosing keywords in your next campaign, check other important SEO metrics like Keyword Difficulty, CPC, Trends on the Check Overview page.
Keyword Difficulty
The Percentage Index (from 1 to 100%) of Keyword Difficulty indicates that your target keywords are difficult to rank for. The higher the percentage, the more difficult it is for your target keyword to rank.
This difficulty percentage is estimated based on the competitive factors that impact the challenges of SEO.
In this case, the keyword difficulty percentage is 78% that it is more difficult for these keywords to outrack the top ranking pages.
CPC
CPC is the actual cost that you pay for these clicks based on the keywords that you’re bidding on.
Running a successful campaign is about achieving the highest ROI without losing sales or lead opportunities. When you set your bids low, your ads may not show frequently enough or they aren’t driving conversions. If you set your bids too high, you will affect the profitability of your campaign.
It’s an important metric to consider if you run PPC ads.
Trend
The trends indicate the interest of researchers in your target keyword over the past 12 months.
The trend of a keyword helps you understand the seasonality of your target audience. That is, you are able to predict when there will be a seasonal increase in traffic with a particular search term.
This trend chart will show you whether the search volume for a keyword fluctuates throughout the year or remains constant over a period of time.
This chart can go a long way in helping you plan for a seasonal keyword. For example, keywords like “swimsuit for women” may be more in trend in the spring and summer months.
SERP Analysis
SERPs Analytics show you the top 100 Google results for your seed keywords. SERP Analytics show you the top 100 Google results for your seed keywords.
You’ll also see key SEO metrics along with the URLs that are currently ranking for your target keywords.
If you find your website in this list, congratulations! Google considers your page one of the best and relevant for this keyword.
Keyword Gap
The keyword gap is one of the special features of Samudra that allows you to analyze your competitor’s website using a unique technology.
This feature offers a comparison between up to five competitor’s keyword profiles.
If you have an existing website or web page and your competitors are outperforming you. So you can find out which keywords you are missing for which your competitors are ranking. So, you can use the Keyword Gap feature provided by Semrush.
Keyword Table
Different data metrics will appear on this Keyword Gad Analysis dashboard based on which you can capture the keywords you are looking for.
- Shared: Keywords that are used by you and your competitors on the your or their website.
- Missing: Keywords that your competitors are ranking on but you have missed it from that keyword.
- Weak: Keywords on which your ranking is much lower than that of your competitors.
- Strong: Keywords for which your ranking are better comparison to your competitor.
- Untapped: Keywords for which you are not ranking but one of your competitor is.
- All Keywords: All the keywords for which you and all the entered competitors are ranking.
It will help you to know where you stand with your competitors so that you know where to focus your SEO efforts.
In addition, with this tool you are able to see the keywords for which your competitors are ranking. Plus, you can identify keywords that are unique to your domain.
Keyword Type
After entering the domain to compare, choose the keyword type. These refer to the type of search engine results you’re analyzing.
Organic keywords are keywords that are organic rankings for any domain in the top 100 search results.
Paid keywords are the keywords for which domains rank in the top 8 positions in the search result through Google ads.
If you click “Select keyword types for each domain” you can compare different types of keywords between sites.
Top Opportunity
The Top Opportunities widget previews the best keyword opportunities for your site (the domain entered in the first field).
Semrush Keyword Gap Analysis lists the top opportunities for you based on missing and weak keywords.
Keyword Overlap
Get a clear picture of how big your site’s keyword profiles are compared to competing sites. The Ben diagram below shows overlapping keywords between each domain.
If you click on a specific intersection, the report adjusts to show only keywords that are inside those intersections.
Keyword Magic tool
Semrush Keyword magic tools are available with the largest database (20 billion keywords and 142 Geo) among all the tools available in the market.
This means you can generate tons of ideas to choose the best keywords for your campaign and also do a more detailed analysis of those keywords.
So let’s see how you can use it for search keywords:
Follow this sequence to access the Keyword Magic tool:
SEO Dashboard » Keyword Research » Keyword Magic Tool
Type your seed keywords and hit the Search button.
Now, you will get a list of keyword measures for your seed keywords, which you can use by filtering the list as per your requirement. As you can shorten the list by high volume so that your keywords with high volume will appear at the top.
You can set modifications like board march, phrase match, exact match or related to narrow down your keyword list even further.
The most important reason to use the Keyword Magic tool is that keywords are grouped by the popularity of associated terms that makes it completely user-friendly.
For example, you can see that the “best mobile” is associated with words like phone, india, android 10000, room etc for the keywords.
Questions Keywords
Question Keywords are important for SEO. Because these are the most searched queries around your target keyword.
The relationship between the answers to these questions in your content and users searching for answers to these questions in search engines can improve your search rankings.
So let’s see how you can find relevant question keywords using Semrush.
Semrush magic keywords have a special Question option that displays all the questions around your main keywords.
So to get the question phrase in your keyword search campaign go to the Magic Keyword Tool and enter the keyword and select the question option.
Longtail Keywords
Long tail keywords are extremely important if you’re looking to do keyword searches in terms of conversions. If in simple words, the longer the keyword, the more likely the user will click for that keyword.
As far as ecommerce websites are concerned, long tail keywords are the key to targeting the user with a specific purchase intent and increase sales.
Long tail keywords are extremely easy to get through Semrush.
Follow the steps below for keywords with a long tail around your main keyword:
- Enter your main keyword in the Keyword Magic Tool.
- Click on Advanced Filter and go to Word Count options.
- Here, you can enter the length range of the long tail keywords you want to see. I have shown here the length of long tail keywords as 4 to 5 words.
By including the right long tail keywords in your page title and content, you can drive profitable traffic when users a very specific intent searches for these longtail keywords.
Final Thoughts
If you want your site to get more conversions with higher rank in search result then you have to look for SEO technology.
So keyword research is one of the important aspect in SEO strategy. Luckily, Semrush the #1 SEO tool in the community with which to find keywords is easy and fun.
We hope this guide on Semrush’s search research features provides a solid framework for starting your keyword efforts.
Related post: The ultimate guide to right SEO-friendly blog post.
Keyword research is an ongoing process. So, you have to check your old posts frequently and make sure they are optimized with relevant keywords. It helps you to maintain your SEO ranking and stay ahead of the top competitors.
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