It has a powerful keyword research and keyword suggestion tool, in-depth domain analytics with versatile (and real-time) reporting, and a very useful backlinks analytics feature, among others.

However, SEMRush certainly isn’t perfect by any means. There are plenty of SEMRush alternatives with lower price tags (or even totally free), and there are tools that are better in certain aspects.

Here, we will discuss those SEMRush alternatives, both paid and free ones. Let us start with some of the best free alternatives available today.

Free SEMRush Alternatives

We all like free things, and these free options are great for small bloggers just starting out, small businesses with a tight budget, and some of them are even good enough for big companies that don’t really need the advanced features of SEMRush, Ahrefs, or other premium keyword research tools.

1. Google Keyword Planner

Since most of us are aiming our SEO efforts to rank on Google, it would only make sense that Google’s own Keyword Planner is one of the best keyword research tools available.

The best part is, if you have a Google account (which is also free), you can Google Keyword Planner without any limitations.

Pros of Google Keyword Planner:

For being a free tool, Keyword Planner is especially good at what it does. There are two core features here: finding new keywords and getting search volume and forecasts.

Using it is simple: enter your seed keyword(s) and then Keyword Planner will show suggestions for keywords, along with important metrics like average search volume, PPC (Pay Per Click) costs, etc.

As a keyword suggestion tool, Google Keyword Planner is probably the best today, especially considering it’s free.

Cons of Google Keyword Planner:

Some of the metrics displayed by Google Keyword Planner are only rough estimates. For example, Keyword Planner will only show “Low”, “Medium” or “High” on the Competition tab.

2. Ubersuggest by Neil Patel

Ubersuggest is another free tool with similar core features to Google Keyword Planner. Coming from Neil Patel, one of the most prominent thought leaders in the world of digital marketing, and it’s absolutely free.

Pros of UberSuggests:

Contrary to Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggests is pretty accurate with its metrics. It only displays 3 metrics: search volume, PPC cost (CPC), and SEO difficulty, but all 3 are pretty accurate, comparable to SEMRush.

Also, it recently launched a new “Content Ideas” feature, where it will suggest topic ideas, along with useful metrics like number of backlinks generated by similar content and estimated monthly visits.

Cons of UberSuggests:

Doesn’t give too many keyword suggestions compared to SEMRush and even Google Keyword Planner. A good approach is to get your keyword suggestion from Google Keyword Planner, and copy it to UberSuggests for more accurate metrics (and content idea suggestions).

3. Searchmetrics

SEMRush is not only about keyword research and keyword suggestion, but also a great analytics tool to analyze your site’s performance from backlinks profile to organic traffic to referring domains. Searchmetrics is a relatively unknown, but a great SEMRush alternative for this role.

You will need to create a free account, but besides that, Searchmetrics is totally free. Simply enter your domain URL (or your competitor’s), and Searchmetrics will generate a report of the domain’s performance on SEO, all in a single page.

Pros of Searchmetrics:

One-page, streamlined analytics report that is totally free.

Cons of Searchmetrics:

Obviously the generated report is less complete compared to SEMRush’s, and only offers basic analytics tools.

Paid SEMRush alternatives

While as mentioned, the most common issue people have with SEMRush is its hefty price tag, some of us are probably looking for SEMRush alternatives due to other reasons. Below are some paid alternatives for SEMRush, along with a brief discussion for each on how they’ll compare to SEMRush.

1. Ahrefs

Probably the closest competitor to SEMRush, Ahrefs is very similar to SEMRush in terms of features and overall functionality. Price-wise, Ahrefs also offers similar package plans to SEMRush. All Ahrefs’ packages are $0.95 cheaper than SEMRush’s offers. In the long run, you still spend less, saving almost a dollar monthly.

Pros of Ahrefs:

As mentioned, Ahrefs offer similar set of features to SEMRush for almost a dollar cheaper each month.

Ahrefs is also stronger than SEMRush in the link analytics department: reporting more metrics and each more accurately than SEMRush. In the past, its keyword research function is significantly below that of SEMRush’s, but nowadays it’s catching up.

Another unique feature of Ahrefs is the useful SEO Toolbar add-on for Chrome and Firefox. This toolbar will show useful metrics like search volume, backlinks profile, and PPC cost for all search engine results on your browser. A very useful feature.

Cons of Ahrefs:

Only one user can use Ahrefs at any given time, even if you opt for the more expensive packages. This can be an issue if more than one people are working on SEO in your company.

2. Moz Pro

Moz Pro is another famous name in the world of SEO and digital marketing, due to their prominent digital marketing blog and their Domain Authority scoring system. Similar to Ahrefs, all of Moz’s plans are $0.95 cheaper than SEMRush (even cheaper if you subscribe to annual plan), so it’s another cheaper alternative (albeit so slightly).

Pros of Moz

Not related directly to the Moz Pro tool, but Moz offers various useful resources on the SEO and digital marketing topics in general. By subscribing to one of Moz Pro’s plans, you’ll get 1 on 1 session with an actual expert that will help you in achieving your SEO goals.

As mentioned, Page Authority and Domain Authority are devised by Moz, so all their tools will integrate these metrics (which can be very useful).

Moz’s interface is very user-friendly and arguably the best compared to SEMRush and Ahrefs, and even then there are the various resources that can help you learn about the platform.

Also, the very basic plan can be accessed by two different users, which can be useful if you have more than one SEO marketers.

Cons of Moz

It takes a little longer to receive data and reports from Moz compared to SEMRush. Also, most of Moz’s good features are offered for free, while the advanced features included in the pro plans are a little bit lackluster compared to SEMRush.

3. SpyFu

SpyFu, as the name suggests, is a tool focused in spying on your competitors’ sites. SEMRush does offer similar features, but due to its focused approach, SpyFu’s competitor analytics features are more in-depth and diverse.

With that being said, SpyFu is a little lacking on features to analyze your own domain, but is significantly more affordable than SEMRush at just $33/month, one-third SEMRush’s price.

Pros of SpyFu:

As mentioned, SpyFu costs just a third of SEMRush’s, Ahrefs’, and Moz Pro’s costs, while offering a very advanced set of features for competitive analysis. You can, for example, get a detailed breakdown of your competitor’s traffic sources (so you can target similar sources), their Google Ads spending, their ranking keywords, and their backlinks profile, among others.

In the competitor analysis department, SpyFu is arguably the best in its class. SpyFu is also relatively easy to use, and by being a SpyFu registered customer, you can also get a plethora of learning sources.

Cons of SpyFu:

SpyFu, as mentioned, is focused on competitor analysis, and while you can also use the same tool to analyze your own domain, it won’t be as comprehensive as SEMRush or Ahrefs. There are no dedicated keyword research and keyword suggestion tools as well.

However, considering its cost, there are plenty of workarounds for this issue, for example by combining SpyFu with free keyword research and analytics tools we have discussed above.

4. Monitor Backlinks

Another key feature of SEMRush is the ability to analyze your and your competitor’s backlinks profile. Backlinks analysis is important so that you can avoid Google penalty due to low-quality links, while by analyzing your competitor’s backlinks, you can also gain insights on how to build your own.

Monitor Backlinks starts from $47/month where you can monitor 1 domain and 2 competitors’ domains. However, there is the Free Backlink Checker tool where you can generate free reports for two websites per week, which is a handy free alternative for backlinks analytics.

Pros of Monitor Backlinks

Focusing on—as the name suggests— monitoring backlinks profile, Monitor Backlinks is very powerful in that purpose. Even the free tool can generate reports for 300 backlinks for free, and for the premium plan, you get various advanced features like the ability to monitor important metrics like Citation Flow and Trust Flow, the ability to preview a link and scan for malware, and many more.

If you are solely looking for a backlinks profiling tool, Monitor Backlinks is a good choice.

Cons of Monitor Backlinks

Considering its fairly limited (focused) set of features, the $47/month price tag is quite expensive.

5. Serpstat

Serpstat is a cost-effective alternative to SEMRush that offers a range of features for SEO and SEM. Regarding pricing, Serpstat is significantly cheaper than SEMRush, making it an attractive option for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Pros of Monitor Backlinks

The software boasts an impressive set of features, including keyword research, competitor analysis, site audit, backlink analysis, a keyword database with over 6 billion keywords, and the ability to track website rankings on various search engines. It also provides a detailed analysis of website visibility and performance on search engines.
Unlike Ahrefs, Serpstat allows multiple users to access the platform simultaneously, making it an ideal choice for larger organizations with multiple SEO specialists.

Cons of Monitor Backlinks

Serpstat’s link analysis capabilities are not as strong as Ahrefs, and it may not provide as many metrics for backlink analysis. However, it constantly improves its link analysis tools to catch up with its competitors. The user interface of Serpstat may not be as intuitive as SEMRush, and it may take some time to learn how to use all of its features effectively.

In conclusion, Serpstat is an excellent alternative to SEMRush, providing a comprehensive set of features for digital specialists at a significantly lower price. While it may not be as vital in link analysis as Ahrefs, its constant improvement and updates make it an excellent choice for businesses of all sizes.

End Words

We all have different needs and different SEO goals. For some of us, SEMRush is probably still the best option for most SEO experts even after considering all these alternatives. However, there are tools that are focused on certain features, making it a better alternative to SEMRush in that aspect. There are also a plethora of free tools that might be sufficient for your current needs.

The post Best SEMRush alternatives: Paid and Free Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

The post 25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

There are many different guides for keyword research available. The thing is, each of them offers completely different instructions, that may end up confusing you in the end. This is mainly caused by the fact that keyword research for a certain business might need a different approach when compared to other companies, due to many factors.

So, here we will try to discuss a framework of keyword research that can be applied to any company. Before we begin, however, let us discuss the main concept of keyword research.

The Concept of Keyword Research

Keyword research, in a nutshell, is the process of finding the keyword(s) you want to rank for.

There are three main concerns in finding these keywords:

• How relevant the keyword is for your business. For example, if you are a restaurant business, sports-related keywords are probably not relevant
• Are many people searching for the keyword? Even if the keyword is relevant, it won’t bring much value if not too many people are searching it. This is what referred by “search volume”
• How difficult it is to rank for the keyword (keyword difficulty and/or competition). Also, the more competitive the keyword is, the more expensive the CPC (cost-per-click) for paid search ads.

Although these three factors are the most important ones, there are other concepts we should understand when discussing keyword research. Here are some of them:

• Generally the shorter the keywords (or key phrases) are, the more competition you’ll have. So, long-tail keywords are generally less competitive than short-tail ones.
• Focus keyword, or main keyword, is the keyword we deemed as the most important, and our main goal is to rank for this keyword.During keyword research, finding the focus keyword is your priority.
• Behind every keyword or search query is a deeper concept we know as search intent. Which is, the actual goal of the searcher. Knowing the search intent can further maximize your SEO result.

The Importance of Keyword Research

Here is the deal: sometimes the words or phrases we use to describe our brand, product, or service don’t really align with the phrases our audience are using. When this mismatch happens, your potential prospects simply can’t find your product, service, or content.

This often happens when you have a unique product description: for example, you are a restaurant which, in essence, is selling sandwiches, but you call your sandwiches “healthy bars”. If you’re solely focusing on “healthy bars” as your keyword and not on “sandwiches” and its variants, your potential audience might not be able to find you through search engines.

So, we are back to the three key factors we have discussed above: we should focus our optimization efforts on phrases and words that people actually use.

The 3-Step Keyword Research Tactic

Below, you will find the keyword research method used by SEO expert Mike, which comprises of just four steps. Obviously this is not the only tactic available, and further below we will also discuss some other tips to maximize your keyword (and topic) research results.

1. Define Keyword Research Goal(s)

Above, we have mentioned why keyword research is important, and three important factors to consider when performing keyword research.

Here, we will expand that concept: to have a successful keyword research, you must first define your goals. The key here is truly understand your business and your audience, and align those two to find the right keywords.

Here are some important questions to ask in this step:

• What is your business?
• What is your website about? (Can be similar to the first question, but can be different)
• What is your unique proposition?
• What promises do you make on your site?
• What niche are you in?
• How can you be a thought leader/expert in that niche?
• How usually your audience find your business (or your competitors?)
• What are your audience’s common problems?
• What is your audience’s need?

And so on. The more (proper) questions you have, and the more detailed your answers are, the better you can define your goal(s).

2. Understanding Your Audience’s Search Intent

We have briefly discussed the concept of search intent above, but how can we effectively utilize it to maximize our SEO results?

Whenever someone (including us) searched something, we are aiming to get something, the search query is just a mean to an end. Generally, there are four different types of search intents:

1. Transactional intent

Here, the aim of the searcher is simply to make a purchase, and finding the best possible location to make that transaction. This can be finding the best restaurant near you at the moment, finding an online product to buy, or even creating a new email account.

2. Commercial Investigation Intent

Quite similar to transactional intent, but here people are researching and comparing different products or services before making a purchase. For example, you are looking to buy a new book but you can only purchase one. Here, you are searching for different reviews and recommendations before you decide on a book.

3. Navigational Intent

Navigational queries are simply performed with the aim to visit a specific website, but the searcher don’t know the specific URL. So, usually the search queries here are the name (or close variants) of a website.

4. Informational Intent

People are looking for a specific information or an answer for their question. This can be finding directions to a destination, finding solutions for a specific problem, finding out the score of last night’s football game, and so on. Most of the queries here are non-commercial, people are not looking to make a purchase but to find an answer.

After we’ve understood those four different intents, ask yourself what are the intents of your potential audience before they usually find a site (or product/service) like yours?

For example, if you are a SaaS company selling a marketing automation tool, some of your prospects might directly look for your site after a colleague’s recommendation (navigational/transactional intent). Some other can stumble upon your site when researching for different products similar to yours (commercial investigation intent). Some others might be looking for a solution for their business issue, and stumbled upon your content (informational intent).

As we can see, the SaaS business can have potential audiences from all four different intents, and so this business must optimize different keywords covering all those intents to maximize visibility.

However, there are cases where a business might only get traffic from one or two intent types. For example, it’s quite uncommon for people to directly visit a restaurant’s website with an informational intent, usually they’ll first visit a food blog instead.

Finding out the search intents of your potential audience will be a core step in deciding on your keyword(s).

3. Make a List of Keywords and Possible Topics

This is probably the most important step, but this step won’t be as effective without a thorough understanding and execution of the two previous steps. If you skipped to this section, we strongly encourage you to go back to step 1.

There are many different approaches you can use in this step, that’s why your goals (step 1) and your understanding of your audience (step 2) are important to limit your options.

Remember the three main principles of keyword research we have discussed at the beginning of the article:relevancy, search volume, and competition. Based on these principles, here are a few approaches we can do in this step:

1. Start From a Single Focus Keyword

Depending on your business model and industry, there will be main, focus keywords that can define your niche or industry. For example, if you are a digital marketing consultant, your focus keyword can be “digital marketing tactics”. If you are an ecommerce site selling smart home technologies, your focus keyword can be “smart home”, “smart home tech reviews”, and so on.

With this approach, we can first figure out this main focus keyword, and then we can find more keywords related to this focus keyword. For example, if your focus keyword is “digital marketing tactics”, you can try to find related, even long-tail keywords with enough relevancy, search volume, and reasonable competition.

2. Monetization Approach

This approach is useful for blogs and sites that are mainly aimed to generate money from the blog itself (not selling ecommerce products, not directed as an inbound marketing channel for the main business, etc.).

In this method, we find a product, service or offer we can monetize, and then we try to find keywords or queries related to this product/service with enough search volume.

A good example here is for affiliate marketing blogs, commonly covering products from Amazon or ClickBank. For example, there is an affiliate marketing opportunity for a product named X, which is a smart home hub product. In this case, we can target keywords like “smart home assistant reviews”, “best smart home hub”, and so on.

3. Using The Available Data to Generate Keywords

There are at least four ways you can use the available data to find your keywords:

1. See what keywords you already rank for. Also, check out keywords where you are ranked on the second or third page, where you can optimize them with just a little boost
2. See the keywords your competitors are ranking for. You can aim to compete on these keywords or use them as your inspiration to find other keywords
3. Based on number one and two, you can use keyword suggestion tools like UberSuggest, Soovle, and others to generate keyword ideas
4. Manual keyword research by truly understanding your niche. For example, if your main niche is basketball, keyword suggestion tools might not suggest keywords like “best slam dunk” or “best Michael Jordan highlights”, you will need to think them manually.

For these three approaches, you can use various tools from Google Search Console, Adwords Keyword Planner to third-party tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to assist you. The fourth approach, however, is a little different, as it will rely on your expertise and experience regarding your niche.

The key to success in this step is a thorough understanding about your niche/industry, and your audience. The more you know about your niche, and the more you understand your audience, the more precise and relevant your keywords will be.

Important Keyword Metrics To Understand

There are literally millions of keywords and key phrases to choose from. So, how can we determine the “right” ones? Above, we have discussed that there are three main factors to consider: relevancy, search volume, and competition. These metrics below will help you measure those three factors:

1. Search Volume

We have repeatedly mentioned the term “search volume” above. However, what actually is it? The search volume as a metric refers to the overall number of searches of a given keyword, usually measured monthly. So, a search volume of 10,000 will mean 10,000 searches a month.

The important question is, how high a search volume can be considered decent? The answer will depend upon several factors, especially your niche and your market size. Generally, search volume around 800-1,000 and above is worth pursuing.

2. Clicks

Even when the search volume is high, it won’t bring much value when not many users are actually clicking the link. This especially happens of search queries where Google display featured or rich snippets.

Generally, aim for keywords with at least 50-60% clicks over the search volume. If not, it’s probably not worth it.

3. Competition/Difficulty

The more popular and specific the keyword is, the more competition you will have. Measuring competition can be difficult, and more often than not, you will need to manually research the keywords by Googling it, looking at the top-ranking content pieces, and so on.

Third-party tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs do offer keyword difficulty metrics, mainly based on the backlink profile on each keyword.

4. Cost-per-click (CPC)

CPC is more important for PPC advertisers than for SEO purposes. However, if the CPC is high, it is a strong indicator of a valuable keyword, especially if you value commercial intent.

If you want to measure CPC accurately, make sure to monitor it on Adwords dashboard instead of third-party tools. This is mainly because CPC fluctuates a lot over time, and third-party tools often only offer a snapshot of the data.

End Words

Keyword research is a rather tricky subject: it is fairly simple to understand, but can be really tough to implement as it also involves a lot of manual fine tunings and guessworks.

However, by using the framework we have shared above, you can have an easier time in executing your keyword research.

In the end, keyword research is about priority: SEO can be time and resource-consuming, and you should prioritize the keyword(s) that will bring more value to your business. Keep that in mind when choosing the right keywords, and keep evaluating your progress.

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