Keyword Research Tools

Keyword Research with Ahrefs

1. Brainstorm ‘seed’ keywords

Seed keywords are the foundation of the keyword research process. They define your niche and help you identify your competitors. Every keyword research tool asks for a seed keyword, which it then uses to generate a huge list of keyword ideas.

If you already have a product or business that you want to promote online, coming up with seed keywords is easy. Just think about what people type into Google to find what you offer.

For example, if you sell coffee machines and equipment, then seed keywords might be:

• coffee
• espresso
• cappuccino
• french press

Note that seed keywords themselves won’t necessarily be worth targeting with pages on your website. As the name suggests, you’ll use them as ‘seeds’ for the next steps in this process. It should only take a few minutes to find them. 

2. See what keywords your competitors rank for

You need to identify those competitors. Just search Google for one of your seed keywords and see who ranks on the front page.

For example, if you sell coffee equipment, you might find more actual competitors in the search results for “cappuccino maker” than “cappuccino.”

Once you find a few websites that fit the bill, you can plug these websites into a competitive intelligence tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer one by one, then check the Top Pages report. You’ll then see their popular pages by estimated monthly search traffic. The report also shows each page’s “Top keyword.” That’s the one sending it the most organic traffic.

You can repeat the process above over and over for near-unlimited keyword ideas.

3. Use keyword research tools

Plug in a seed keyword, and a tool will pull keyword ideas from their database based on that keyword.

Here’s how the reports match keyword ideas:

• Phrase match:

Keyword ideas that contain the ‘seed’ keyword as is.

For example, if your seed keyword is “computer chair,” then “black computer chair” would be a match. However, “black chair for computer” wouldn’t, even though it also contains both words.

• Having same terms: 

Keyword ideas that contain all the individual terms from the ‘seed’ keyword in any order. For example, if your seed keyword is “computer chair,” then “black chair for computer” would appear in this report.

• Questions: 

Keyword ideas that contain each term from the ‘seed’ keyword in any order, plus a “question word” like “how,” “what,” “where,” “when,” or “why.” For example, if your ‘seed keyword is “computer chair,” then “what is the best chair for computer work” would appear here.

4. Study your niche 

A good starting point is to browse industry forums, groups, and Q&A sites. This will help you find more things that your prospective customers are struggling with that didn’t show up in keyword tools and that none of your competitors bothered to cover.

Having tons of keyword ideas is all well and good. But how do you know which ones are best?

Use SEO metrics to narrow things down and separate the wheat from the chaff before adding them to your content calendar.

Five keyword metrics you can use:

• Search volume (search volume tells you the average number of times a keyword gets searched per month)
• Clicks
• Traffic potential (estimated searches and clicks per month)
• Keyword Difficulty (They account for many different factors: number (andetc. quality) of backlinks; domain rating (dr); content length, relevance, freshness; use of the target keyword, synonyms, entities; search intent; branding)
• Cost Per Click (CPC) (shows how much advertisers are willing to pay for each ad click from a keyword) 

As you’re looking for keywords, analyzing their metrics, and grouping them, ask yourself:

• What is the estimated traffic potential of this keyword?
• How tough is the competition? What would it take to rank for it?
• Do you already have content about this topic? If not, what will it take to create and promote a competitive page?
• Do you already rank for this keyword? Could you boost traffic by improving your rank by a few positions?
• Is the traffic likely to convert into leads and sales, or will it only bring brand awareness?

How to Find Featured Snippet Opportunities Using Ahrefs

Step 1: List the keywords you already rank for

Gusto.com as an example here. Their copywriters have done a terrific job landing featured snippets. 

To start, put your domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

Hit that button and we’re off!

This gives you an overview of your domain. But what we really want to see is your organic keywords.

Ahrefs will show you the master list of everything your site ranks for.

Since we’re specifically looking for snippet opportunities we’ll focus on keywords that already rank in the top 10 positions.

Step 2: Find all potential featured snippets

So we have all the keywords we rank for. Now we need to find out which of those keywords get featured snippets.

Just filter by SERP feature:

And just like that, you get a list of every keyword that currently has a featured snippet result.

In Gusto’s case, it looks like they have several thousand potential snippet opportunities. Granted, there will be a lot of duplicates here—more on that later.

If you look over to the right, next to your URLs, you’ll see a few quotation mark icons. These icons indicate that you already hold the featured snippet for this keyword.

On some rows, you won’t see those little curly quotes. For these keywords, someone else has the featured snippet spot.

We’ll deal with those soon.

A quick note here. See those bubbles next to search volume—the ones with the little numerals in them?

That’s another Ahrefs feature. These give you an overview of all the SERP features associated with that keyword. 

So, if want to get an idea of what sorts of SERP features you’re up against, just click on those bubbles to get an overview.

So now we have a list of every featured snippet within reach.

If we were working with a small site, we could just work off this screen alone. But since we have so many potential snippets to grab, let’s export this data.

.

Now you know:

• All the keywords you rank on the first page for
• Every single snippet opportunity within reach
• Which snippets you already own
• Which snippets you don’t

Step 3: Set up your spreadsheet

If you’re only chasing a few specific snippets, skip this step. But if you’re taking a comprehensive approach to optimizing your site for snippets, you’ll want a spreadsheet.

This is the process of how to set mine up in Google Sheets. You’re welcome to grab a copy to use yourself. It has all the formulas, so it’s ready to go.

There are 3 working tabs essential: “raw,” “dedupe,” and “competitors.”

The raw tab is where you put that big export of all featured snippet opportunities from Step 2.

It’s a lot of data, and as you work your way through it, you’ll realize that a good deal of these keywords are duplicates. That’s because Ahrefs counts each instance your website ranks for a given keyword.

Remember, almost every single featured snippet comes from a result on the first page anyway—which means every featured snippet you own will result in a duplicate keyword.

Working with a dedupe tab—it’s where we’ll make a list of the unique keywords that get that Google snippet love.

So at this point, you’ve got your spreadsheet set up with raw data on your domain and a list of unique keywords.

Step 4: Pull the data on your competitors’ featured snippets

Now it’s time to get busy collecting data on everyone who currently occupies the featured snippets we don’t.

Let’s go back to the Organic Keywords report in Ahrefs (the one we exported in Step 2) and take a closer look at the first snippet that we aren’t occupying.

Hit that “SERP” button.

This shows you what Google’s currently fetching for the average SERP on this keyword. You can see which URL is occupying the featured snippet right away.

Now, we could just add that URL to the competitors tab on our spreadsheet. But with Ahrefs, it’s easy to export every single keyword it occupies the snippet for. (This saves us a ton of time in the long run, because many of these competitor URLs will occupy snippets for multiple keywords!)

First, we’ll find where that URL shows up in the non-feature results.

Then, we’ll look up the keywords that URL ranks for.

Here we are again: looking at a set of organic keywords. But this time, we just want to find all the snippets this specific URL is featured in.

And Ahrefs makes that very, very easy. All you need to do is tell Ahrefs that the “Target domain must be featured” in the SERP features drop-down menu.

Once that’s done, you’ll see a beautiful sight: every single snippet this URL appears in. Export that.

Quick note here: this makes it super, super easy to find those “Snippet hubs”. (These are URLs that appear in 10 or more featured snippets.)

Now, you’ll want to dump the data you exported on this one page into the “competitors” tab in your spreadsheet.

Step 5: Compare your competitor’s snippets to your own

We need to get an overview that tells us the following things:

1. Which snippets do we already hold?
2. Which snippets does someone else hold?
3. Who occupies those other snippets?

With a little functional magic, we can see it all:

I created a new column in my dedupe tab titled, “Are we featured?” Then I used a combination of IF and VLOOKUP functions to pull this off. The specific formula is:

=IF((VLOOKUP(A2,raw!B:L,11,FALSE))=”Featured snippet”,”Yes”,”No”)

… which tells my dedupe tab to check my raw data to see if my domain is in a featured snippet. If it is, then we get a “Yes.” If not, “No.” Some conditional formatting makes it easier to know at a glance whether or not we’re in that coveted snippet (that’s where the red/green comes from).

Now we’ll want to have an idea of which URLs are occupying the featured snippet spot—regardless of whose domain they’re on. We can do that with a little creative functioning, too.

In case you want to copy my formula, I used:

=IF(E2=”Yes”,C2,VLOOKUP(A2,competitors!B:G,6,FALSE))

… which tells the cell to replicate my domain’s URL if I already have the featured snippet, or pull from the competitors tab if I don’t.

From here, you can start plugging in things like the featured snippet type (list, paragraph, or table), domain authority, or whatever else you find important.

Repeat steps 4 and 5

Keep plugging away at competitor snippets until you have data on all the keywords you think are valuable.

If you do this, you’ll be well set up to do target strategic snippets.

Google Trends

How it works, and what type of trends tracks?

The Google Trends homepage lets you do the following: 

• Explore what the world is searching for by entering a keyword or a topic in the Explore bar
• See stories curated by the News Lab at Google that provide additional insights found in the data

Note: This section is only available in some countries

• See Daily Search Trends
• See Year in Search data
• Find guidance materials about News Lab and Trends

The Trending searches page:

The Trending searches page shows trending searches around the world. You can click on a story to get more context, like the most relevant articles or trending queries. Trending searches include Daily search trends and Realtime search trends as described below:

• Daily search trends highlight searches that jumped significantly in traffic among all searches over the past 24 hours, and updates hourly. You can use Daily search trends to see what people are most interested in at any given time, and how the searches rank compared to one another.
• Realtime search trends highlight searches that jumped significantly in traffic among all recent searches. The Realtime searches are collections of Knowledge Graph topics, Search interest, and Google News articles detected by our algorithms. 

How to compare terms

1. Open Google Trends.
2. Search for a term like “java.”
3. Inside the Topics box, click + Add term.
4. Add another search term, like “coffee.”

To remove a term, hover over the search term box and click .

Note: No misspellings, spelling variations, synonyms, plural, or singular versions of your terms are included.

Compare searches

Important:

If you enter a search term using non-Latin characters, you only see data from countries or regions that use those characters. For example, if you enter ”ねこ,” the Japanese characters for “cat,” you don’t see much data for the United States since many people in the United States use “cat” as their search term.

To compare searches for Japanese characters for “cat” to searches for “cat” in English, search for both terms by combining them with a “+” sign, like ”ねこ + cat.”

Compare locations

• Open Google Trends.
• Search for a term, like “hamburger.”
• Then, in the + Compare box, search for another term, like “veganism.”
• In the right side of the “hamburger” search box, click More  Change filters.
• Select a country or region, like “United States,” and click OK.
• In the right side of the “veganism” search box, click More  Change filters.
• Select a country or region, like “Germany,” and click OK.

You can also view “Interest by subregion” charts in your data.

Compare time periods

• Open Google Trends.
• Enter a search term and search.
• Then, enter a search term in the “+ Add Comparison” search box.
• In the right side of the first search term box, click More  Change filters.
• Select a time period or enter a custom time range and click OK.
• In the right side of the second search term box, click More  Change filters.
• Select a time period or enter a custom time range and click  OK.
• You can now see “Interest by region” charts for each time period in your data.

Compare terms and topics

You can define your search words as terms or topics depending on your search needs.

Terms

Search terms show matches for all terms in your query, in the language given.

If you search the term “banana,” results include terms like “banana” or “banana sandwich”

If you specify “banana sandwich,” results include searches for “banana sandwich,” as well as “banana for lunch” and “peanut butter sandwich”

Topics

Topics are a group of terms that share the same concept in any language. Topics display below search terms. If you search the topic “London,” your search includes results for topics such as:

“Capital of the UK”

“Londres,” which is “London” in Spanish

How to export a chart

To analyze Trends data further, you can export charts as CSV files.

• Open Google Trends.
• Search for a term.
• In the top right of the chart, click Download Download.
• Open the file using a spreadsheet application, like Google Sheets

Find related searches

When you search for a term in Trends, you see searches related to your term in the related searches sections at the bottom of the page. If you’re comparing multiple search terms, locations, or time ranges, you can see related top searches by selecting the tab for your term.

Top searches

Top searches are terms that are most frequently searched with the term you entered in the same search session, within the chosen category, country, or region. If you didn’t enter a search term, top searches overall are shown.

Rising searches

Rising searches are terms that were searched for with the keyword you entered (or overall searches, if no keyword was entered), which had the most significant growth in volume in the requested time period. For each rising search term, you see a percentage of the term’s growth compared to the previous time period. If you see “Breakout” instead of a percentage, it means that the search term grew by more than 5000%.