In the previous section, we learned that most of SEO can be boiled down into two steps:
1. Find good keywords to target.
2. Write articles about those keywords.
This tutorial will focus on that first step – how to find good keywords to target.
What is a “good” keyword?
A “good” keyword is one that has the following characteristics:
- Low difficulty: Not many websites are writing articles targeting that keyword.
- Medium to high search volume: A good amount of people are actually searching for that keyword.
To actually find these metrics, you’ll need to use keyword research tools. These are tools that tell you the search volume and difficulty of different keywords.
First, I’ll explain how to use the most popular paid keyword research tool on the market – ahrefs – then I’ll share some free keyword research tools you can use as well.
What is ahrefs?
The site ahrefs.com allows you to look up difficulty and search volume metrics for keywords. They offer four different monthly plans:
They also offer a 7-day trial for just $7 that I highly recommend using before committing to a monthly plan because you can actually perform enough keyword research and download enough keyword data for free during a 7-day trial that you likely won’t even need a monthly plan.
Once you sign up with ahrefs, you’ll gain access to two of their most helpful tools:
- Keywords explorer – find data about search volume and difficulty for any keyword
- Site explorer – find out which keywords competing sites currently rank for
Next, I’ll share how to use both of these tools.
How to Use the ahrefs Keywords explorer
The Keywords explorer does exactly what the name implies – it allows you to explore the search volume and difficulty for keywords.
For example, suppose I want to explore these metrics for the keyword “linear regression in Excel”
Once I click the search button, the following information pops up:
There are two metrics that we care about the most:
- Keyword difficulty: How difficult the keyword is to rank for in the top 10 search results, on a scale of 1 to 100.
- Search volume: The average number of monthly searches this keyword gets per month.
Here’s how I think about these two metrics:
Keyword difficulty:
- Less than 20: low difficulty
- 20-30: medium difficulty
- Greater than 30: high difficulty
Search volume:
- Less than 300: low volume
- 300-600: medium volume
- Greater than 600: high volume
For a new website, I would mostly target keywords that have a low difficulty and at least a medium search volume.
With that said, it can be okay to target keywords that have low difficulty and low search volume early on simply because it’s better to get at least some traffic when you’re just starting out.
Based on this criteria, “linear regression in Excel” would make my list of “good” keywords to target.
I would then repeat this process over and over again, searching for good keywords to target. If I’m having trouble coming up with keyword ideas, one helpful place to look is the “Also rank for” panel, which displays related keywords:
If I click “View all” then I can see a massive list of related keywords along with their volume and difficulty:
I can then comb through these keywords and look for ones that have low difficulty and decent search volume.
How to Use the ahrefs Site explorer
Another great way to find keywords to target is to use the ahrefs Site explorer tool. This allows you to look up any website and see which keywords they currently rank for in Google.
The best way to use this tool is to look up a competing site in your niche. For example, one of my competitors for Statology is statisticsbyjim.com.
I can look up his site on ahrefs using the Site explorer tool:
Once I click the search button, I can see an overview of his site:
The most interesting metric on this page is the DR, which stands for Domain Rating and is a measure of the site’s authority on a 100-point scale. The higher a site’s authority, the easier they’re able to rank new articles on Google. I generally consider a DR less than 15 to be low, a DR of 15-30 to be medium, and anything over 30 to be high.
To see the keywords that this site ranks for, I can click Organic keywords on the left sidebar. This brings up a new page that shows the keywords that this site ranks for, sorted by total organic traffic:
Here’s how to interpret this page:
- Keyword: The actual phrase people are searching for in Google that lead them to the site.
- Volume: Total searches this keyword gets per month.
- KD: Keyword difficulty – how difficult it is to rank on the first page of Google for this keyword, on a 100-point scale.
- CPC: Cost per click – the average amount an advertiser pays for a click on their ad that targets this particular keyword. This isn’t relevant for us.
- Traffic: The monthly organic traffic that statisticsbyjim.com actually receives from this particular keyword.
- Position: The position that statisicsbyjim.com currently ranks for in the search results for this keyword.
- URL: The specific URL that people actually click on.
One helpful feature I often use is the Export button in the top right corner of this page. Once I click that, I’m presented with the option to download this keyword data into a CSV file.
Once I click Start export, a CSV file is automatically downloaded to my computer. Here’s what that file looks like:
This is an incredibly helpful tool if you simply want to use the 7-day ahrefs trial because you can download as much keyword data as you want about your competitors and have that data sit on your own computer even after you cancel your trial.
This is exactly what I did when I started Statology – I downloaded keyword data for several competitors in the statistics niche, saved the CSV files in a folder on my computer, and then cancelled my 7-day ahrefs trial. This data alone gave me enough keywords to go after for a full year.
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