You’ve probably heard content marketers mention that they use the SEMrush tool for keyword research. When we talk about content marketing, the first word that comes to mind is SEO. And when we discuss SEO, our initial thought is keyword research.
Understanding how to use SEMrush is the first step toward in-depth keyword research. One should always start with the Overview option to generate some ideas related to your broad keywords. You can then head over to the Keyword Magic Tool to find the best low-competition keywords to target. Take your research to the next level using the Phrase Match feature to find highly-targeted long-tail keywords.
In this piece of content, we will discuss the process of doing keyword research with a popular tool in the market: SEMrush. We will also look at how you can maximize the tool’s benefits and use a 7-day free trial to start without worrying about paying immediately.
And believe me, you can do loads of keyword research in just seven days with the SEMrush trial.
Using the SEMrush Tool for Keyword Research
We all know that keyword research is one of the most important and fun ways to understand the queries and questions of an audience. It helps us curate content specifically for users. Content that targets explicitly higher volume and low-competition keywords have a higher chance of ranking and getting more traffic and conversions.
However, finding the appropriate keyword is not easy anymore as it was a couple of years ago. Things have changed, and you need to perform extensive keyword research with the right tool, keeping in mind the correct intent of the audience, plus the keywords with a higher search volume.
Start With Keyword Overview Under Keyword Research
You must sign up for a free SEMrush account to access the dashboard.
As you log in to your SEMrush dashboard, you will see several options on the left sidebar. Click on the Overview option under the keyword Research tab.
Now you entered the section where you can enter any broad keyword. The tool will then provide you with a list of keywords related to the topic. Also, it would be best to filter according to the country you want to target with the keyword.
In the below example, I entered the keyboard “buy books.” After you click the search button, the tool will provide you with an overview of the particular keyword in the selected country, as shown in the screenshot below.
In the screenshot, you will find four different parameters according to your entered keyword. Below is an explanation for each one of them:
1. Volume
Volume is the section where you can see how many people search for a particular keyword in the selected country. In this example, we have a 5.7k total volume.
As you can see, the keyword difficulty is way higher, standing at 85% with the red mark. The keyword provides an average CPC of $0.70. And 0.87 is the keyword difficulty level in a PPC campaign.
2. Global Volume
The global volume section will display all the searches happening all over the globe for that particular keyword. It has nothing to do with a particular country since it’s a global search. As you can see, we have individual searches from the US, UK, India, Australia, Canada, etc.
3. Results on SERP
These are the total results indexed in the SERP by the search engine, which in this case is around 9.3 billion. Remember, this SERP is only for the United States.
Note: Not all 9.3 billion results will be accurate for the keyword we searched if we consider the searcher’s intent. Somehow these results show up cause they contain the word Book or Buy.
4. Keyword Variations
SEMrush will also provide you with the keyword variation of all the particular keywords you searched. As you can see in the screenshot, there are 48.8k keyword variations in the United States alone. In total, we have 310.1k total volume of keyword variations all over the globe.
You can use all these keyword variations to target your piece of content to multiple keywords in the search engine. Some are long-tail keywords (long query searches), and some are primary ones.
5. Question
This is similar to the keyword variation section, which includes all types of keywords, like long-tail and primary keywords. Question sections only contain long-tail keywords, with more variety and accuracy. As you can see, under questions, we have 14.6k total volume in the United States and 115.1k total volume globally.
If you want traffic from all over the world, you can easily include all these global keywords in your content, and search engines would likely rank you in those demographics.
6. Trends
The trend is a graph that shows the growth or decline of the keyword search volume over 12 months. The trend is wholly based on a metric analysis of the number of searches per month.
So why is this trend section so interesting..?
Because it shows you the monthly analysis of the searches based on the targeted keyword. Therefore, it will give you an idea of how much traffic that particular keyword will generate for you in all the years or for just a specific occasion.
For example, let’s say you have a festival keyword, which will only provide traffic for a particular period.
So it gives you an idea of what kind of content you should create for these keywords or if you should choose this keyword for your content marketing strategy.
One more thing you can do is find a couple of broad keywords related to your specific niche or blog. You can collect more keywords and more related categories to collect trend data.
Use the SEMrush tool for keyword research, and it will provide you with trending searches and how searches are changing over time. As a result, you can curate your blog content, eventually leading you to build a better strategy and gain authority.
Moreover, SEMrush also provides you with more tools to find more profitable keywords that will lead to massive traffic.
Related and Phrase Match Keywords
You will find the Keyword Magic Tool option in the left sidebar, just below Keyword Overview. You can click on it, or you can simply click on the related options, as shown in the Keyword Overview screenshot.
Now, most advanced content marketers use these tool’s features to enhance their marketing game. Using these features is a little tricky, so you must understand how to use them.
Before this, we focused on finding broad and parent keywords, which we would use for our content marketing strategy.
These parent keywords have more significant keyword difficulties, making them hard to rank for because more high-authority websites are already ranking for them.
There are fewer chances for new websites to rank for keywords that are higher in difficulty. So we can target low-competition keywords, even if they have low volumes. These keywords will be powerful enough to generate traffic for your website when it comes together.
We call these keywords low-hanging fruit, and beginners should leverage them to build a strong ranking profile for their website.
SEMrush will provide you with low-competition keywords by analyzing the backlink profile and content length of the top 10 websites on the SERP.
Big and authoritative websites do not focus on low-competition keywords because they have the advantage of focusing on high authoritative keywords with a high search volume.
The 100 searches/mo volume does not entice big websites to create content. Therefore, it’s the perfect chance for beginners to optimize content for keywords with a volume of at least 100. My recommendation is always to focus on above 100 in search volume.
Is targeting keywords with a low volume worth the effort?
Absolutely yes. Why..?
This is because these low-hanging fruits are easy to tackle. And when you target one primary keyword in a blog post, it is more powerful because big websites do not target them.
If you create content about a particular keyword, the search engine will rank you higher on the SERPs.
I recommend you create long-form content so the search engine also ranks you for LSI (latent semantic indexing).
The Correct Way to Use the SEMrush Phrase Match Feature
Most advanced content marketers use this feature to target those keywords that are not broad but are specifically narrowed towards their content strategy.
When we use the phrase match feature, the tool will fetch long-tail keywords that are somehow related to the primary keyword you searched for in the Keyword Overview.
Phrase match can also fetch the long tail keyword related to the keyword. Suppose you searched for a product. This feature will provide you with alternative keywords people are searching for that contain your searched term.
As you can see in the above screenshot, there are several keywords that people are searching for, and there are some keywords that have good buyer intent.
In this screenshot, you cannot see the total keywords (21,793) that are related to the searched keyword. However, when you research these keywords according to your intent, you will find the best keyword that will serve as a traffic magnet.
As you can see from the keyword highlighted in the screenshot, these two keywords are “how to buy books on kindle” and “how to buy audible books”. These are called buyer intent keywords. Users type this kind of keyword in a search engine when they have a problem and they want an immediate solution to that problem. If buyer intent is worth it, the search volume will usually be high for these keywords.
The Correct Way to Use SEMrush’s Related Keyword Research
Starting as a beginner, you don’t always understand the niche completely. Still, we all have to start somewhere and understand the process down the line.
As you start working on your website, you will come across many ideas to create content you never heard of. Still, they are excellent ideas, and you want to implement them.
With the power of related keyword research, you can search for a keyword and find related keywords and content ideas. Related keywords and ideas don’t need to belong to the primary keyboard, but they should belong to the niche.
Now, consider the keyword “buy book.”
Suppose you try to target this keyboard directly. In that case, it will be impossible to rank and get traffic because of its significant difficulty.
Some use Google-related searches, which also do not work in this case because that will only provide you with limited related searches that are closely linked to the primary keyword.
Here you can use the SEMrush-related search feature, which will quickly provide you with thousands of related keywords like online book order websites or book ordering websites.
There are thousands of ideas that you can put in the search bar, and it will find you millions of related keywords, which will give you content ideas and help you create more unique content for search engines.
Understanding SEMrush Keyword Difficulty
Let’s take the example of the keyword we have, which is “buy book,” with around 5.4k searches in the United States alone and 17.6k/month globally.
Now, you may think that with that global volume, you will have floods of traffic from that one keyword. That’s true but only for the website with the highest authority since it can tackle the keyword difficulty.
Most of these keywords have more significant difficulty because many websites have already published content with them. So how do we tackle this situation? Simply avoid posting content with these keywords.
That’s why the keyword research tool provides a list with keyword difficulty. A tool like SEMrush uses complex algorithms to determine data like domain authority (DA), page authority (PA), backlinks, social authority, content length, website age, and many others.
Always check manually in the search engine when you take data from keyword research tools (like top 10 SERPs). After all, these are just tools, and sometimes the data doesn’t get updated immediately.
Just type the primary keyword in the search engine search bar and manually check out the top 10 results.
SEMrush ranks the keyword difficulty from 1 – 100%. The keywords with a percentage closer to 100 will have greater difficulty, and those with a percentage closer to 1 will have a lower difficulty.
Conclusion
This tutorial explained keyboard research in the SEMrush tool, which will enable you to find highly profitable keywords that are easy to rank in search engines.
In addition, we also discussed how you could build a collection of long-tail keywords and content ideas from just one primary keyword in the same category without having any deep understanding of the industry.
This is the main reason to build a website and start putting out content based on the keywords and ideas you collect from this tool. As you move forward in the journey, you will find more profitable ideas to explore.
We are here to help you start your keyboard researching journey without spending much out of your pocket.
That’s why you can sign up for SEMrush for a 7-day free trial. In this trial period, you can use the SEMrush tool for keyword research and find many keyword ideas to last for months.