Keyword Research: The Beginner’s Guide by Ahrefs

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• Note that seed keywords themselves won’t necessarily be worth targeting with pages on your website

• It’s a common rookie mistake to disregard low search volume keywords. They’re just as useful as their more popular counterparts. Often even more useful, since they’re more specific and often have high commercial value.

• pinpointing the right search intent doesn’t end with identifying the right page type for a particular query. Ideally, you want to factor in the following variables: Type – For example, blog post, product page, category page, landing page, online tool, etc. Format – For example, guide, listicle, news, review, comparison, etc. Angle – That’s your unique spin on a given topic.

• 1. Brainstorm “seed” keywords

• 2. See what keywords your competitors rank for

• How to find keyword ideas

• ARE YOU SEEING A LOT OF TOPICS YOU’VE ALREADY COVERED?

• In this case, you should try using the Content Gap report

• Use keyword research tools

• So don’t obsess too much over your seed keywords.

• Google Keyword Planner (GKP for short) is perhaps the most well-known keyword tool

• few other free keyword research tools.

• Matching terms

• It has two modes: “Terms match” and “Phrase match.”

• “Terms match” shows keyword ideas that contain all words of your seed keyword in them, regardless of where exactly they are and what order they’re in. So if our seed keyword is “coffee machine,”  we’ll get the following keyword ideas: coffee vending machine machine gun kelly coffee shop “Phrase match” only returns keyword ideas that have the words of your seed keyword in the exact order as you entered them. Like so: best coffee machine coffee machine with grinder

• Also rank for” shows you search queries that the top-ranking pages for your seed keyword also rank for.

• “Also talk about” shows you words and phrases that are frequently mentioned on the top-ranking pages for your seed keywords.

• Experienced SEO professionals typically gauge the ranking difficulty of each keyword manually. That is, by looking at the search results for each keyword and analyzing them. They account for many different factors to judge how hard or easy it’ll be to rank: Search intent Content depth, relevance, freshness, authority Number (and quality) of backlinks Domain Rating SERP features Etc

• One person might believe that Domain Rating is important, and another might think that relevance plays more of a role.

• The opinions might also vary depending on the type of search query that they’re analyzing, because for different kinds of queries Google gives preference to different things.