Keyword Research SEO Tips

In part 2 of keyword research SEO tips, we’ll look at other things you can do to find profitable keywords for your website.

One such method is looking for related keywords using Google Correlate. Let’s search for “weight loss” again, and at this point, I just want to skim through the correlated keywords and look for interesting words.

So based on this list, I’d choose anything that looks remotely relevant like “percentage,” “average,” “salad,” “vacation,” “peanut,” and “vacations.”

Now go back to my keyword tool and look at the ‘all keywords’ section with “weight loss” and “lose weight” set as our seed keywords.

This time, I’m going to include and paste in a comma-separated list of our related keywords.

I’ll make sure to show keywords where any of these words appear, and we have yet another list of relevant keywords, where most are actually pretty low-competition.

But you should be a bit sceptical here and ask why are this low competition?

In this case, part of it has to do with search demand, but a good chunk of these are because a lot of other sites don’t know about these keywords or at least they don’t seem to be targeting it with much interest.

You just need to filter, analyse the search engine results pages for search intent, and target the ones worth going after.

The next one of my keyword research SEO tips is to find low-competition topics with high search traffic potential, and the way I do this is by using Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, which has a database of over a billion pre-vetted pages of content.

Just search for a query related to your niche, and you should see a lot of relevant results.

Next, set a filter to only show pages that get at least 500 monthly search visits.

The final filter will be to only show pages that have a maximum of 5 referring domains or unique websites linking to the page.

And the reason why we’re doing this is that we know that backlinks from unique websites help a page rank higher in Google, so looking for pages without a lot of backlinks, yet still generating a good amount of search traffic, likely means there’s an opportunity to be had.

Looking at the results, I see this one on a 1,200-calorie meal-prep that gets around 3000 monthly search visits. Click on the organic traffic number, and you’ll be able to see all of the keywords it ranks for and their keyword metrics.

The next one of my keyword research SEO tips is to find keywords that forums are ranking for. From an ownership standpoint, forums are great because it’s all user-generated content.

People are actively asking questions, providing answers, and the owner is able to reap the traffic as a result.

On the flip side, forum pages that are ranking high are generally easy topics to rank for because they often contain low-quality user-generated content.

Now, this makes your chances of ranking with a well-crafted page high, and on top of that, since the content is usually below par at best, it’s unlikely they’ve generated a lot of links.

But the sheer amount of content they have, they’re still going to manage to rank for all sorts of random keywords. For example, Quora gets around 90 million search visits each month. Yahoo Answers gets around 17 million monthly search visits, and StackOverflow get around 22 million search visits every month!

Some of the pages at Quora are generating over one hundred thousand search visits per month without any or many links from unique websites.

Looking at the top pages for Quora is great if you’re in a niche that doesn’t have any high-traffic forums, but if you can find a niche-relevant forum with high search traffic, then you’ll find a gold mine of rich keyword ideas to mine.

Let’s say you have a site about golf, you’ll know about the popular GolfWRX forum.

First, check how much search traffic they get and it looks like they get a good amount of search traffic.

Next, go to the top pages to see the pages or questions that are driving the most search traffic for them. You might notice that the top keyword for a lot of these pages are branded queries, so let’s exclude keywords like ‘wrx’ and ‘golfwrx’

If we go through the list, I see another pattern. They’re ranking for a lot of keywords with a golfer’s first and last name, and WITB (stands for “what’s in the bag.”).

So back over to our keyword tool and search for “witb” as our seed keyword.

Next look at the Phrase match to see all keyword ideas that contain this word, and I immediately see a whole bunch of low-competition keywords that will be worth going after.

I could get all nerdy on you here and go on and on about looking for footprints and then following the yellow brick road to keyword heaven, but I’ll leave you with these tips to try them out for yourself.

If you’re a newbie when it comes to keyword research and you’re looking for more of a process, then I highly recommend checking out some of my other keyword research tutorials which you will find helpful.

Don’t forget to check out Part 1: SEO Keyword Research Tips and I’ll catch you in my next free SEO tutorial, which reveals 3 easy tips on how to speed up your WordPress site that will make your website load lightning fast (which is a major Google ranking factor) 🙂