Keywords are the terms people enter into search engines to find answers to their problems.  When it comes to doing Keyword research, we’re looking for keyword opportunities that allow our websites to provide content that delivers the information that people are searching for.

 Trying to rank high in search engines for common keywords is hard to do, so it’s much easier and quicker to get ranked if you target less frequently searched terms with a potentially high conversion rate?

Using long-tail keywords is the way to go.

Lucky there’s a tool that makes it extremely easy to find long tail keywords.  It’s one of Semrush’s specialties.

So, how should you use Semrush to do keyword research?

Follow the steps in the workflow below in order to do keyword research on Semrush. Use the Workflow to build a targeted SEO optimized keyword list.  

It will be a list full of related queries your customers are researching, giving you the opportunity to create relevant content for them.

The website used for this workflow was swimmingpool.com.

Who is Your Competition?

Whatever market you’re entering into, there should be competition if you hope to make money.  If there isn’t any competition, you might need to reconsider your choice of business.

The first step in any keyword research, is to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for, so, we begin by doing a competitive analysis.

• Type your domain name into the Organic Competitors report. This report will return results showing you the current competitors based on common organic keyword rankings. (1)
• Have a look at the list of sites and choose 4 to use in a comparison. (2)

Look For Keyword Opportunities in Your Industry

• Add the competitor website details in the Keyword Gap tool with your domain name in the first box and compare organic keywords in the regional database that you want to target. (3)
• This report shows you all of the overlaps between the keyword portfolios of your website and those of your competitors.

• To find the easiest keywords to rank for, change the filter to search for keywords that have a KD range less than 50. The lower the KD score, the easier it will be to target the keyword and organically rank for it in search engines. (4)

• People search for information online for a reason (Intent).  SEMRush has a nifty function called the Search Intent Filter that helps you quickly sort through and analyze keywords by search intent (5).
• You can choose from one to several intent types to filter for the right target keywords.
• Make decisions on whether you should and how to target a keyword based on a user’s intent: transactional, commercial, informational, or navigational.

The search intent filter makes it easy to see and compare how your competitors rank for keywords of a specific intent type. To see the entire website URL associated with a keyword, just hover your mouse over the position of interest.

• To find out how you compare with your competitors look at the Missing and Weak lists (6) – the keywords listed here are keywords that your site either has much worse rankings for than your competitors, or you have none at all while they do. 
• Find the most relevant keywords for your website that have low KD and of a specific search intent, and use the checkbox to add them to your Keyword Manager list (7).

Here is how the report should look. Once you’re happy with the keywords you’ve found in this process, export your list to a file to save your research (8).

Find Long Tail Keywords

Once you’ve found general topics to target from the Keyword Gap exercise, you can dive deeper into keyword research with the Keyword Magic Tool.

• Enter your target keyword as a “seed keyword” here to find more ideas (“small inground pools” for example). (9) 
  

• Apply a filter for KD % (Keyword Difficulty) to find keywords that are easy to target and relevant to your site, and another filter for Word count greater than 4 for finding those long tail phrases with 4 or more words in them. (10)
  
  

• Look through the long-tail keywords from this report and look for any relevant topics to add to your list.
• If you see lots of long-tail keywords around a single subtopic, it could be a good opportunity for you to target that topic with content on your website.
• See the long-tail keywords about small fiberglass swimming pools below.
  
  

Now that you have a list of keywords you can use them as the foundation of your SEO strategy.

Try the following to start optimizing:

• Add your target keywords to a campaign with your domain name in the On Page SEO Checker to get other ideas for optimizing your site around those keywords.
• Enter a target keyword into the SEO Content Template to get a suggested template for writing a webpage that is optimized for the target keywords.
• Add your list of target keywords to a Position Tracking campaign to track your progress as you start creating content and adding it to your site.

You now have a Keyword Research Framework

Now that you have a keyword research framework, it’s time for you to use it to find keywords that will be easy to rank for.  Just remember to also use keywords that have the right intention behind them if you want to make sales.

Be sure to answer all of your visitor’s questions and concerns before they need to ask.  Some business people are afraid to talk about price up front because they believe a Quote is necessary. 

The people looking for pricing online don’t care for quotes. 

They want a starting price and they understand that costs will vary based upon any add-on products/services, so, your job is to let them know what the starting price is and how any additions will affect the final price.

Use the tools at your disposal to craft your SEO strategy.  If you’re not sure what we mean by SEO Strategy, reach out and I will give you a resource to visualize your website and show you how to plot your content in a way that makes sense.

Let me know if you have any questions whatsoever.