A fundamental part of an SEO campaign is being able to do effective keyword research to find out what your target customer is searching for in Google.
“Keyword research helps us remain competitive against other design agencies in the search engines.” says Jamie Costello from BGN Agency, a digital design company based in the United Kingdom.
What you might think are ways that your audience searches for your product, won’t necessarily be how you’d expect. Using keyword research tools like SEMRush can help you gain useful insights into the important questions your customers are asking.
There are several tools that you can use to conduct keyword research, but a great one is SEMRush which is affordable, powerful, and even has a generous 30 day trial.
This article shares some tips for getting useful keyword data out of SEMRush.
View Competitor’s Top Keywords
A useful feature in SEMrush is being able to look at your competitor’s top keywords.
First enter your competitor’s domain and then click on “Organic Research” and “Positions.
In this example you can see that the top keyword accounts for almost 1% of all the organic traffic to the website. You can look at their page that is ranking so well and learn what they are doing well. If you think you can create a better piece of content that can outrank their page, you could potentially add a lot of traffic to your website.
Check Your Keyword Ranking Trends
Entering your website’s main URL and clicking on “Organic Research” on the left menu displays a history of the number of keywords your site ranks for.
This website has over 28,000 keywords that are ranking on the first page of Google (position 1 to 10). You can see by the graph that the number of ranking keywords has increased significantly from 2015 to 2019.
This is an example of a website that is doing an excellent job of growing their organic traffic over time. You can look at what factors have contributed to their growth and potentially surface some ideas to implement on your own website.