SEO Keyword Research Tips

In this SEO keyword tutorial, we’re going to cover some advanced SEO keyword research tips to find topics worth going after.

Keyword research is a process, but the problem is that some of the best keywords and topics can’t be found through a conventional process.

Pete here with Plymouth SEO Services, the SEO specialists that helps you get more leads and customers from your website.

If you’ve seen any of my other blog posts on keyword research, you know I talk about entering a couple of seed keywords into my keyword tool, going to a keyword ideas report, applying some filters and then picking topics to create content on.

This is how keyword research is normally done and it works, but the thing is that if everyone is doing keyword research this way, then everyone’s finding the same keywords, so they’re going to be much more competitive.

Instead, you need to look into additional methods that your competitors might NOT be using.

With that said, let’s start hunting for some keyword ideas.

The first thing you should do is find pages that are sending a lot of search traffic to your competitors, and I’m going to touch on a couple of things to look for here.

So let’s say that I have a yoga site. I’d start off by looking for a competitor’s website. And by a competitor, I’m talking about websites that are ranking for the keywords that you also want to rank for, so they might not be your direct business competitors in this case.

I’ll start off on Google and search for a keyword that’s popular like “yoga exercises.”

Since the top page is ranking high and you can clearly tell that the domain is relevant to yoga, I’m going to run a competitive analysis on their domain.

So I’ll head over to my SEO keyword tool, and enter in “douyoga.com” and it looks like they’re getting hundreds of thousands of search visits each month, making them a good target for further analysis.

If you find the site you’re analysing doesn’t get very much search traffic, say less than 40,000 search visits in a popular niche like yoga, then you may want to try a different site.

Since we found a competitor with a lot of search traffic, let’s next head over to the section where you can see the pages that generate the most search traffic for the site.

Now, because the yoga site doesn’t discriminate against which part of the world you’re from, I’m going to switch this to show traffic estimations from all countries.

Here are some more SEO keyword research tips for you: There are two ways you can use this data. The first is to find low-competition topics that get search traffic.

Since we know that backlinks from unique websites help a page rank, let’s just look at the section that shows that.

For anything that has less than 15 referring domains, these might be low-hanging fruit worth going after.

Let’s take a look at the page URL and top keyword for pages that fit this bill. This will help us evaluate whether these are relevant topics for your site.

If they look relevant, add the traffic number to our analysis.

This column will be a good indication of whether spending your time and money building those links will be worth the estimated traffic you could get.

So the ones I’ve chosen are all getting at least a few thousand search visits per month, so the traffic I can get from ranking for these pages would probably be worth going after.

Finally, I’ll look at the section showing the position. Looking at these pages, I see that a page is ranking in position 6 for “yoga for weight loss,” which isn’t a very high position.

So that tells us that ranking ahead of them could produce much more traffic for us.

The second way is to look at the traffic distribution going to these pages. I don’t know about you, but I hate losing in anything. Beat me in a game of tennis, and I’ll immediately challenge you to another match.

Outrank one of my sites in Google and I’ll come back with my big guns blazing 🙂

Within the ‘top pages’ section, I can see the total percentage of traffic each page accounts for across the website, and I can see that the topics “yoga poses” and “yoga for lower back pain” account for around 15% of this website’s entire search traffic.

Assuming this was my direct business competitor, I’d go after these topics for the sole purpose of owning as much relevant traffic and taking it away from them.

After you’ve depleted the list of this competitor’s top pages, go to the section showing the competing domains to find even more relevant websites to get new ideas from.

Rinse and repeat.

The next of these SEO keyword research tips is to discover keywords your competitors aren’t targeting.

If you can find the keywords your audience are searching for, but your competitors haven’t found, you can leverage a huge advantage to increase traffic and engagement on your content.

The good news is that you can find the keywords that your direct competitors aren’t targeting.

The bad news is that there isn’t a cookie-cutter formula to find these. It requires a bit of creativity.

Here are a couple of ways you can find some out-of-the-box keyword ideas:

First, look at Google Trends for stand-out keywords. Let’s say we’re in the ultra-competitive ‘weight loss’ niche. I’ll run that search in Google Trends and scroll down to the Related queries. Looking at the results, you’d immediately see something interesting. Celebrity names.

And if we go to the next page, you’ll see even more. So let’s keep that in mind.

Now, head back over to your SEO keyword analysis tool to dig a little deeper.

I’ll search for a couple of seed keywords like “weight loss” and “lose weight.” Next, I’ll look for the phrase match.

Since we’re looking for celebrity-related weight-loss queries, we need to try and identify a pattern, also known as a footprint.

So based on our research from Google Trends, I find that these queries have exactly four words: “First name,” “last name,” “weight,” “loss.”

So I’ll set the word count section to show keywords with a min and max value of 4. This will show us queries with exactly four words, and now we can easily spot celebrity names like Rebel Wilson, Melissa McCarthy, Susan Boyle, and Mama June.

And if you look carefully, you’ll see that all of these keywords have low keyword difficulty scores.

Just what we’re looking for.

To further narrow our list, let’s set another filter to only show keywords with lower keyword difficulty, and you now have a shed load of low-competition celebrity weight-loss keywords, which may be a good way to enter an ultra-competitive niche.

These are all great SEO keyword research tips to help you find keyword ideas, but of course, most niches aren’t filled with celebrity names, so in part 2 of Keyword Research SEO Tips, we’ll look at the second thing you can do 🙂