When you start a blog or an online business, the first thing you must learn is how to do keyword analysis of a website. (Also known as Keyword Research)
Once you learn Keyword Analysis for your website, not only you’ll be able to rank better and increase your conversions, but you will also learn to perform a keyword analysis on your competitor’s website.
And who knows? One day you will outrank your competitors in the SEO Game!
Also, keyword research helps you understand what exactly your users/readers want. So, you can always write a blog post focusing on such keywords and solve their problem.
In this article, I’ll show step by step process of Keyword Analysis with SEMrush (Free 7-Day Trial). During this free trial, make sure you take full advantage of this tool.
This will help you to understand the tool and get your hands on before you pay. Let’s start.
What is Keyword Analysis?
Keyword Analysis – also known as Keyword Research is a procedure of analyzing the best keywords or search queries that would bring visitors to your website through organic as well as paid search.
In the word of Digital Marketing, it is the first and most important step of any strategy.
If you learn to do Keyword Analysis, you will easily do these ninja kinds of stuff:
- How much traffic a particular keyword can bring.
- Identifying more related and long-tail keywords you can use.
- Finding out for which keywords your competitors rank.
- How difficult or easy it would be to rank for a particular keyword.
Step 1: Understanding Keyword Overview
As mentioned above, I will be using SEMrush. You can sign up for a free account for 7 days here and follow the steps.
Once you sign up and log in to the dashboard, click on the overview tab under the keyword analytics options as shown below:
Once you click on it, you will see a box on the right side.
Enter your broad topic (parent keyword) for which you are finding targetted keywords. You can add multiple topics separated by commas.
Make sure you select the right country before you click on the Analyze button. Otherwise, you will get the wrong data about your target audience.
For this particular tutorial, I’ll be using the mattress as my topic. Once you click on Analyse, you will see this page:
On this screen, you can find 5 different reports for my parent keyword – Mattress.
1. Volume
The number of people searching for the keyword (Mattress in my case 450.K) per month in the United States.
2. Keyword Difficulty
SEMrush analyses the number and gives us the difficulty percentage. So that we don’t play the guessing game. In my case, 91% and it’s really hard to rank for it.
3. CPC (Cost per Click)
If you are planning to run paid ads, you can get an idea of the average cost per click ($5.48 here). This comes from analyzing other websites bidding for this keyword.
4. Result on SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
This data shows how many web-pages are already ranking for this keyword. In my case, 918 Million Pages making it a tough competition.
5. Keyword Variations, Questions, and Related Keywords
This is where the magic happens. If you’re just starting, targetting a parent keyword with extremely high competition would be difficult (nearly impossible).
So we will have to play around and search for keyword variants along with Search Intent.
Now, complete these steps for at least 5 parent keywords for which you want to rank higher. These can be your long term vision or your broader business/blog type.
Step 2: Finding Keywords
As mentioned earlier, keeping using your parent keyword as your main keyword would make things worse. Or, it will take a lot longer time expected.
Now, we have to find related keywords that are easier to rank for and have a good search volume. They are like a blue ocean beach whose water is cleaner and will give you good pictures. Why?
Because there are fewer people – Low Competition.
We are targeting low searches keyword. After all, they are left by the authoritative websites because they already rank for parent keywords.
Even if we get keywords with the search volume of as low as 20, we should jump for it. Something is better than nothing?
Now click on the ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ option below Keyword Overview.
This is called a magic tool because here, you will find thousands of keywords.
1. Question Keywords
The first thing you should try is to look for the questions. Because questions are basically common problems that people face. And, they are looking for solutions.
If your blog article or product solves the problem, they are more likely to buy your product.
If you have just started a blog or your website and your authority is not high, I would recommend adding a filter with keyword difficulty of 10%. Keep increasing the percentage to find more keywords.
You can also sort your results by volume.
I found 5 good keywords with a search volume of 90. And, they are buying intent keyword. If you manage to be on top for those 5 keywords, you have a chance of getting 450 targetted visitors on your website.
If you write an awesome article, probably you will convert a lot of visitors into customers.
There are other 73,788 more keywords to search from.
2. Related Keywords
You can follow the same process in related tabs and find our blue-ocean keywords. If your niche is broader, related keywords can really help you.
The related keywords may or may not contain your exact keyword. It helps in diversifying your niche.
As a matter of fact, Mattress is a vague and large niche. And Google’s related search queries may be unprofitable. That’s where SEMrush would help you to find such keywords.
In the related keywords tab, I found keywords like – furniture mattress, single bed mattress, king mattress, pillow foam.
Likewise, you can find 100s of keywords with the help of SEMrush.
Step 3: More Website Keyword Analysis with Keyword Magic Tool
Having only a bunch of keywords is not enough. You have to produce a lot of content and which requires a lot of keywords. Using the above method could be tedious.
Keyword Magic Tool can make your website keyword analysis more effective with only 1-word keywords like ‘Mattress’.
Let us see how.
You would have noticed that Keyword Magic Tool segregates all the keywords as per the category. Select one of them if they fall in your niche and click on the plus sign and add them to a list:
You should always do this as it keeps your list of keywords curated, segregated, and more filtered. So that you can use all the keywords in 1 article.
Now go to Keyword Manager in the Keyword Analytics section.
Click on Update Metrics and it will update the data in real-time. Now click on Show option in Top Competitor column.
This will give you a list of the top 10 competitors you have to outrank.
Now you can analyze your competitor’s content and see their way of writing and putting keywords. Your goal should be to write better content than all.
You can also spy on your competitor’s keywords and follow the same procedure as above to find out more keywords. Here’s how:
- Copy your competitor’s URL (In my case I’ll find keywords for www.sleepadvisor.org) and enter it in Domain Overview Analysis.You will see the Organic Search traffic section and click Keywords.
- Now you will get a list complete list of keywords for which your competitor is ranking. Select long-tail keywords and follow the steps as above.
This way, you will have a large list of keywords that are already working for your competitors.
Step 4: Write an Awesome Content
Now that you have a list of at least 50-100 keywords (Grouped as a List). Write a great article. More detailed, with more information as well as longer than your competitors.
You should also try to smartly add those keywords smartly. If your content is good, eventually you will outrank your competitors. Therefore, increasing your conversions. Even if visitors don’t convert then and there, you can use email marketing strategies.
Once you write and publish your article, you should also focus on creating relevant as well as quality backlinks. SEMrush can help with that too!
You can search for those websites/blogs that are linking to your competitors and ask for backlinks. Or just enter your competitor’s domain here:
For instance, you can tell them that you’ve written better content and if they would like to link your article too.
Conclusion – Keyword Analysis for Website
The main idea here is to keep researching and analyzing more and more keywords for your website. In other words, the process is known as the rabbit-hole method.
You can also take this Free Course by SEMrush for Keyword Research.
The more keywords you have and the more content you produce, it will get easier for you to rank.
Keyword research is indeed the most important part of content marketing. If you ignore this, things would be really difficult for you in Digital Marketing.