hey it's ammo and welcome to the third
lesson in our keyword research module
in this lesson i'm going to show you how
to find keywords for your website
based on the things you learn in lesson
one and two of this module
let's get started so keyword research is
the process of finding keywords that
people are searching for
in search engines and the general
process can be divided into two macro
steps
step one is to generate keyword ideas
and step two is to validate whether
those keywords are worth going after
now this lesson is mostly about step one
generating keyword ideas for your
website
and in order to do that you need a
keyword research tool
keyword research tools show you
information on keywords like
their search volume keyword difficulty
scores and other seo metrics
plus they should help you discover
potential topics worth going after
there are a lot of tools out there and
you're free to use whichever ones you
want
but for this course i'll be using ahrefs
keywords explorer
now i also understand that some people
may not be in a place to purchase
seo software right now if that's you
then we also have a free tool called
ahrefs keyword generator
which is a good place to start i'll
leave links to both tools in the
description
all right so we're going to be doing
some keyword research for the rest of
this lesson
so let's say that the website we're
doing keyword research for is a golf
blog
and the way this blog generates revenue
is through affiliate commissions
meaning they promote other people's
products and when someone clicks on one
of the links and makes a purchase
you're compensated with a commission so
the first step is to come up with a list
of seed keywords
and a seed keyword is just a broad
keyword related to your niche
so i'll go to hf's keywords explorer and
add a few seeds for our golf site
so that might be golf balls golf clubs
and golf hats to name a few next i'll go
to the phrase match report which will
show us keywords that include
any of these phrases and just like that
we have around 125 000 keyword ideas
with search volumes and a ton of other
helpful metrics
some of which we'll touch on later now
125 000 keywords is just
way too much to filter through so before
we continue
let's take a second and revisit the five
point checklist from the first lesson in
this module
again the five things we're looking for
when it comes to choosing keywords
are one we want keywords that have
search demand
two keywords with traffic potential
three keywords with business potential
four we need to be able to match search
intent
and five we wanna know how hard it'll be
to rank
at the top of google for that keyword
so when we're generating keyword ideas
we'll be able to check off the first
four points
as for the fifth we'll tackle that in
the next lesson
all right let's look back at our list of
keyword ideas and start checking off
some of these boxes
so first we need to find keywords that
have search demand
to do that you can set a search volume
filter to show keywords
with a minimum volume of at least 300
monthly searches and now that list has
just shrunk to 351 keyword ideas
which will be easy to manually filter
through
the next point on this checklist is to
see if they have traffic potential
again traffic potential is a more
reliable metric
than search volume because not all
searches result in clicks
and at the end of the day we want
traffic not searches
to check the traffic potential of a
topic you need to look at the top
ranking pages
and see how much traffic they're getting
to do that you can click on the surf
button beside any of these keywords
so if we do that for the quarry golf
clubs you'll see that the top page gets
around sixteen
thousand monthly search visits from the
us
now if you don't have an ahrefs account
you can get a free version of the serp
using hf's serp checker tool
next up is business potential again
business potential is simply the value a
keyword has to your business
and while 16 000 monthly search visits
seems great
you need to consider the fourth point on
the checklist which is to ask yourself
if you can match search intent
as you can see almost all of the top
ranking pages are ecommerce category
pages
so searchers are probably in shopping
mode but we have a golf affiliate
blog so the site probably isn't selling
golf clubs
meaning we can't create an ecommerce
category page
and therefore we won't be able to match
search intent
so seeing as this query doesn't fulfill
the points on our checklist
we wouldn't go after this keyword now
looking further down the list
you'll see the quarry best golf balls it
has a high search volume
and if i click on the search button
you'll see that the traffic potential is
around 5
000 monthly visits from the us pretty
good
now in terms of business potential this
keyword would have a value of 3
because our site makes money by
reviewing and recommending products
so it would be super easy to organically
recommend products
in a best of post which i assume would
lead to a fair amount of affiliate
commissions
as for search intent these are blog
posts in the listicle format with the
freshness content
angle as you can see from the titles of
the top ranking pages
so this query checks all boxes and
passed our initial sniff test
so i'll click on the check box and add
it to my golf keyword list now
checking the serp for all of these
keywords would be pretty time consuming
so there's a quick technique you can use
to find relevant keywords
and that's to use keyword modifiers a
modifier is an add-on to a base
keyword for example if our base keyword
is golf hats
we can modify this keyword by adding
best
top or the current year and modifiers
tell us a lot about search intent
a word like best again tells us that a
comparison needs to be made
so searchers are probably looking for
listicle blog posts
with various different product
recommendations
now if a word like how or what is in the
keyword
then it tells us that the top pages will
likely be blog posts or videos
with step-by-step tutorials or some
other informational content
so with this knowledge we can actually
filter this keyword list down to
a keywords that likely have business
potential
and b keywords where we can match
searcher intent
for example since we're doing keyword
research for an affiliate site
modifiers like best top versus
and review would likely bring up topics
where we can organically
recommend products so if we go back to
the keyword list
we can click on the include filter and
paste this list there
next i'll hit the any word tab since we
want to find keywords that include
any of these modifiers as well as one of
our seed keywords
hit apply and we now have a list of
around 30 keywords
that are most likely going to have high
business potential
plus we know that 99 of the time the
results for any best type keyword
will be listicle blog posts and we know
that we can match searcher intent with
our affiliate blog
now if we switch the modifiers in the
include filter to words like how
what who where why
guide and tutorial then we can apply the
list
to find informational topics that we
could write about on our blog
and pretty much all of these keywords
will be fair game for our hypothetical
golf blog
now if you plan to use a list of
modifiers then it's worth noting that
you should probably do it with much
broader seats
for example you'll see that we only have
10 keywords
when using the search volume filter
paired with our list of informational
modifiers
now if i change the c to just golf set
the volume filter to a minimum
of 300 monthly searches and then paste
in my list of informational modifiers
hit the any tab and click apply then
you'll see we have a lot more topics
that we could potentially create content
around
so if this is a method you want to try
then take a screenshot of this list of
and feel free to use them in your
keyword research
now after doing keyword research for
exactly 33 minutes
and 14 seconds i was able to compile a
list of over 190 keyword ideas in my
golf keyword list
now one downside to using keyword
research tools is that the list of
ideas will usually be limited to words
and phrases that include your seats
but there are other great keywords that
won't necessarily include your seeds
so how do you find them well the best
way to find these keywords is to look at
pages that drive the most search traffic
to your competitor sites because if your
competitors are ranking for keywords
that are sending them a ton of search
traffic then i'm sure you'd want to get
in on the action right
now by competitor i'm not necessarily
talking about your direct
business competitors i'm referring to
your organic search competitors
which are websites that rank for
keywords that you'd want to rank for
so to find these competitors i'll go
back to ahrefs keywords explorer
but this time i'll click on my golf
keyword list
next i'll go to the traffic share by
domains report which will show you the
websites that get the most search
traffic
based on your keyword input in this case
our golf keyword list
so as you can see sites like golf digest
golf.com
and golf wrx are getting the most search
from the keywords that i want to
hypothetically rank for
but we already know these keywords since
we created the list
so what you can do is click on the caret
beside a domain you want to research
further
and then click top pages which will show
you the pages that send the most search
to a website and check this out golf
digest page
on game improvement irons gets around 5
400 monthly search visits from the us
this page that ranks for what degree is
a sand wedge
gets around 4 700 monthly search visits
and we wouldn't have seen these in the
keyword ideas report because they don't
contain our seeds
so you can just skim through this list
look for potential topics
then go through those four points in the
checklist for keywords that are
interesting to you
add them to your keyword list and once
you've exhausted a website's top pages
rinse and repeat for the other organic
search competitors
until you're satisfied with your list
and if you're still unhappy with your
you can try and find other seeds within
this report
the two that stand out to me right away
are sand wedge
and fairway woods so i'll go back to
and type those into the search box and
seeing as both of these are different
types of golf clubs
you can add pitching wedge putter
putting
and so on and so forth bottom line there
should be no shortage of keyword ideas
and you should be able to use these two
methods to build a solid list of topics
to keep you busy for years but here's
the thing
even if you've checked off these four
boxes on the checklist
there's still one left and it won't
matter if you don't rank for your
keywords
so tomorrow we'll be publishing the next
lesson where we'll go through a simple
process to understand how hard it'll be
to rank for your keywords in google
so make sure to subscribe so you don't
miss that and if you're watching this
video at a later date
then check the description because we'll
have a link to the entire course there
i'll see you in the next lesson
