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5. Connect Your Google Accounts for Organic Traffic Insights
There are also filtering options for keyword volume, search intent, Keyword Difficulty percentage, and more to help you remove any specific types of keyword suggestions during the keyword research process in Semrush. For example, you may only want to see a list of keywords with a Keyword Difficulty percentage of Easy (15-29%).
By navigating to the On Page SEO Checker Tool in the sidebar menu, you can insert your domain to fetch a list of web pages automatically or manually. The Semrush software will then do a competitive analysis to find out which areas your content can be improved for on-page SEO.
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6. Generate Keyword Topics Using the Content Marketing Tool
First, you need to enter a topic idea into the search field and click the Get Content Ideas button to generate a list of suggestions.
The Organic Research report allows you to filter keywords by ranking position, search volume, Keyword Difficulty, intent, and more.
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3. Analyze Your Competitor’s Keywords for SEO
Doing keyword research in Semrush wouldn’t be complete without tracking the positions for the target keywords you’ve uncovered with the tool and optimized for your website. The Semrush Keyword Position Tracker is what allows you to perform this step.
Three other important features of the Keyword Overview Report for keyword research include:
- Keyword Variations: Any variation of your seed keyword in any order.
- Questions: Question-based keywords based on your seed keyword.
- Related Keywords: Additional keyword ideas based on your seed keyword.
By navigating to the Advertising section in the sidebar menu and clicking on the PPC Keyword Tool, you can use this feature of Semrush to plan and set up optimized Google Ads campaigns and seamlessly import them into Google Ads Editor.
9. Save and Manage Your Keywords In a List
For this tutorial example, I searched for the keyword phrase “SEO tips” to do a quick SERP analysis to find out how tough the competition is for this particular keyword phrase. As you can see in the image below, the Keyword Overview Report in Semrush shows that the keyword phrase has a decent search volume but an extremely high Keyword Difficulty percentage.
On the Keyword Magic Tool dashboard, you need to enter a topic idea and click on the Search button to get a list of the best keywords for your SEO campaign. It also stores your recent searches so you can get to them again in the future as you can see in the image below.
In the example below, I used the various filtering options of the Semrush Keyword Magic tool to find Broad Match keywords for the phrase, “SEO tips” as well as terms with a Keyword Difficulty percentage of Easy. As you can see, there are 7 keyword phrases in the Semrush database that match those criteria and would be extremely easy search terms to target on my website to grow organic traffic.
Another popular way for how to use Semrush for keyword research is to analyze your competitor’s keywords for SEO. This strategy can help you come up with quick keyword ideas that are easy to target and provide a higher return on your content investment.
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7. Do On-Page SEO Analysis for Keyword Research
This part of the report also goes beyond just keyword research to show you which websites you should consider getting backlinks from to improve the off-site SEO signals as well. Clearly, these are domains that are important for link building to help increase the rankings of the target URL in the SERPs based on Semrush’s competitive analysis.
As you can see in the tutorial image below, there are many long-tail keyword phrases that include the seed keyword, “best running shoes”, that are easy to rank for and have a decent search volume for organic traffic.
If you scroll further down the report, you’ll see the SERP Analysis section, which gives you a quick overview of the top-ranking URLs on Google for your particular keyword. You can sort through the top 10 to the top 100 web pages to see the Semrush Authority Score, number of referring domains and total backlinks, estimated search traffic, and number of keywords the URL ranks for in Google.
One of the best methods for how to use Semrush to find keywords is to use perform a keyword gap analysis to develop a long-term content publishing plan. With the Semrush Keyword Gap Tool, you can find out which keywords your competitors are targeting to bring in organic search traffic that is missing from your website.
The key SEO metrics here include:
- Search Volume: Average number of monthly searches over the previous 12 months.
- Keyword Difficulty Percentage: The level of difficulty for ranking in the top 10 positions on Google (0-100%).
- User Intent: Commercial, Informational, Transactional, or Navigational
- Keyword Trend: Search interest over time.
- Cost-Per-Click (CPC): The average amount of money advertisers are spending to target the keyword phrase in Google Ads.
The Semrush On Page SEO Checker recommended that I add the phrase, “what is SEO marketing” to several areas of the page: H1 tag, title tag, body content, and meta description. Apparently, the top competitors have this keyword phrase in those HTML elements and it is missing from my web page, which could be affecting the ranking positions in the SERPs.
Additionally, the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool lets you filter your keyword list by topics to find relevant terms and phrases that fall under specific categories. This feature can be further organized by the number of topically related keywords or monthly search volume.
If you know the specific keyword you want to focus on and want to get a quick analysis of the term for SEO, then insert that phrase into the Keyword Overview Report search field and click the Search button. But if you have multiple ideas for potential keywords to target and want to see how they compare, then add each one (up to 100) to the search field separated by a comma.
On the Topic Research page, you’ll find all sorts of related ideas to your seed topic. In the example below, I used the seed keyword, “lawn care”, to come up with fresh ideas for content related to taking care of lawns.
When you navigate to this tool, you can begin tracking the ranking positions for your domain over time. Set up is quick and easy to do with a variety of keyword importing features, such as typing them in manually, uploading a TXT and CSV file, importing keyword data from Google Analytics, using the Semrush suggestions, etc.
You can also use the various filtering options like position, search volume, Keyword Difficulty percentage, etc, to further customize the Keyword Gap table to find the best keywords to target for your website.
On the Keyword Gap Tool dashboard, you can enter your domain and up to 4 four competitors for keyword research analysis. You then need to click on the Compare button to analyze the keyword data for each domain against each other.
This guide explains how to do keyword research in Semrush.
In the previous step of this guide, we determined that targeting the keyword phrase, “SEO tips”, would be too difficult. However, by analyzing that term in the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, I can find easier keywords to target that can quickly generate organic search traffic to my website with much less effort.
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2. Dive Deeper with the Keyword Magic Tool
The Semrush Position Tracking Tool is unlike any other rank tracker on the market that’s available in a keyword research tool. The daily updates and weekly email reports also make it easy for you to prioritize SEO, PPC, and content work as you try to reach your digital marketing goals.
After you’ve searched for a competitor’s domain, you can sort the report by the following tabs:
- Overview: This gives a snapshot of the top organic keywords, position changes, competitor sites, subdomains, etc, that can be analyzed independently in the other tabs.
- Positions: This lets you analyze the ranking positions and filter them in various ways to find good keywords to target on your site. More details on this are below.
- Position Changes: This displays the changes in organic keyword positions so you can find out if certain keywords are rising or falling in the SERPs.
- Competitors: This shows a list of competitor websites for the analyzed domain which can help you uncover even more websites to analyze for keyword data.
- Pages: This lists the index URLs for the domain for you to quickly analyze them one by one.
- Subdomains: This reports any subdomains so you can analyze them for keyword data as well.
As you’re using the various methods to conduct Semrush keyword research, you’ll have the ability to save and manage keywords you’d like to target for SEO, PPC, and content marketing campaigns into lists. This process is as simple as checking a box next to the keyword and clicking on the “Add to List” button at the top of the dashboard.
Below, you’ll find a step-by-step guide with the top ways for how to use Semrush for keyword research to help grow your organic website traffic quickly and easily. This tutorial includes screenshots and examples of actual search terms and websites to showcase the various keyword methods for creating an effective search engine optimization (SEO) plan.
The next way for how to do keyword research with Semrush is to use use the Keyword Magic Tool. This tool allows you to dive deeper into any keyword phrase to uncover thousands of new ideas for creating SEO-related content.
As you can see in the example below, there are 272 keywords that The Wirecutter ranks in the top 1-10 positions on Google with the word “best” in it with a Very Easy Keyword Difficulty (KD) Percentage (0-14%).
As you discovered, there are many ways for how to use Semrush for keyword research to help grow your organic website traffic with SEO quickly and easily, with the most effective methods using a combination of the Keyword Magic Tool, Keyword Gap Analysis, Organic Research Report, Topic Ideas, and the On Page SEO Checker. Feel free to use Semrush to find keywords for your website using the method you prefer best or all of the strategies explained in this tutorial to help improve your search engine optimization campaigns.
As you can see from this example, there’s a multitude of ideas I can inspect further that do not necessarily contain the phrase “lawn care”. And by clicking on the “Show More” link below “Grass Seed”, we uncover 55 questions related to the topic of grass seed. You can then filter the suggestions by specific question types, like what, how, can, when, why, etc, to come up with good long-tail keyword ideas to target on your website.
Essentially, this keyword research feature enables you to get a list of keywords that actually drive organic traffic to your top-performing pages that are directly reported by Google. You can also check page impressions, click-through rates (CTR), and keyword positions to get more data for each SEO keyword to assess how your optimization efforts are affecting your website’s traffic and user behavior.
I hope you enjoyed this guide on how to do keyword research in Semrush.
After you search for a keyword, you’ll be taken to the keyword suggestion page like the example below.
Another way to do keyword research in Semrush is to connect your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts to Semrush to get Organic Traffic Insights for your website.
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Do Keyword Research With Semrush Summary
The first way for how to do keyword research in Semrush is to get a quick analysis of the keywords you want to target on your website. By navigating to the Keyword Overview Report, you can search for a single keyword or analyze keywords in bulk.
As you can see in the image below, there are 10 tracked keywords for this sample domain (mashable.com) with a multitude of ways to analyze that data such as Ranking Distribution; the number of keywords in the Top 3, 10, 20, and 100 positions; Cannibalization Issues; Featured Snippets, and more.
The Keyword Gap Tool will report a lot of keyword data for you to consider; however, the most important feature of this Semrush tool is the “Missing” report table. This table displays the keywords your competitors are ranking for in the SERPs that are missing from your website.
However, if I click on the “View All” button under any of the Keyword Variations, Questions, or Related Keywords sections of the report, then I can get additional ideas for keywords to target using the Keyword Magic Tool which will be explained next.
Using the keyword data reported in the Semrush Keyword Gap Tool, you could easily come up with a content plan for relevant articles that could be published on socialmediatoday.com that are easy to rank for and can grow the organic search traffic without much off-site SEO effort involved.
Navigate to the Competitive Research section in the sidebar, then click on Organic Research. On the Organic Research page, search for your top competitor’s domain.
Consider this your ultimate guide for how to use Semrush to find keywords that can deliver the highest organic traffic with the least competition for SEO to help you get the best return on investment for your digital marketing efforts.
After conducting this analysis for 35 pages on my website, the following overview was displayed. I then clicked on one of the URLs to inspect it further for keyword research recommendations.
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4. Use the Keyword Gap Analysis to Develop a Content Plan
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10. Track Keyword Positions
For the purposes of the Semrush keyword research tutorial to help you grow your website traffic, we’ll focus on the “Positions” report. Here, you can find out all of the ranking positions for a competitor’s domain and filter the list to get relevant keywords you can also target on your website.
Additionally, the On Page SEO Checker report showed that my content is missing semantically related words that the competition includes. Based on this analysis, I should add phrases like, “Google and other search engines”, “SEO stands for search engine optimization”, “search query”, “SEO strategy”, etc, to improve the on-page SEO signals for the content.
Disclosure: This page includes affiliate links for Semrush. You can try Semrush for free, but when you purchase a paid subscription, I may earn a commission.
How to Do Keyword Research In Semrush
1. Start with the Semrush Keyword Overview Report
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8. Use the Semrush PPC Keyword Research Tool
If this was a competitor of yours, then you could use this SEO data to come up with a long list of keywords to target that would be relatively easy to rank for in the SERPs without requiring a large number of backlinks. The Very Easy KD percentages mean that the top-ranking pages do not have strong backlink profiles; making those keyword phrases easier to target for SEO.
Based on this SEO data in the Semrush Keyword Overview Report, I would not want to put my time or energy into trying to rank for the short-tail keyword phrase, “SEO tips”, because the competition is too difficult. I would need a substantial number of referring domains and backlinks just to compete in the top 10 ranking positions.
At the top of the Keyword Magic Tool, you’ll see several filtering options:
- All: A list of all keywords containing your seed keyword.
- Questions: Question-based keywords that include your seed keyword.
- Broad Match: Variations of your keyword in any order.
- Phrase Match: Phrases that include your exact match seed keyword in various orders.
- Exact Match: Keyword phrases that only contain your seed keyword in exact match order.
- Related: Terms and phrases that are related to your seed keyword.
Now, if switch gears and look for a keyword phrase like, “best running shoes”, to come up with keyword ideas for review product content based on commercial intent while keeping the search criteria Broad Match with an Easy Keyword Difficulty percentage, then we unlock more than 182 ideas to target for SEO content.
In the example below, you can see that I compared two domains against each other (socialmediatoday.com and socialmediaexaminer.com). I then filtered the keyword data to only show the missing keywords that contain the word “how” and have an Easy KD score that socialmediaexaminer.com is ranking for in the SERPs that socialmediatoday.com is not.
If you want to use Semrush for keyword research for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, then it has a great tool for this purpose called the PPC Keyword Tool.
Another unique way to do keyword research with Semrush is to tap into the power of the Topic Research report under the Content Marketing Tool section. Although this tool is primarily used to help you generate new ideas for engaging content, it can also be mined for long-tail SEO keyword suggestions.
Now, if you use the Topic Research Tool like this in Semrush to come up with new long-tail keyword ideas, make sure to analyze the phrases you like best in the Keyword Magic Tool. That way you can measure important SEO metrics like the average monthly search volume and Keyword Difficulty percentages to find out if the search phrase is worth targeting or not based on the metrics that matter most to you.
You can also use Semrush to find keywords that can be used to improve the on-page SEO for your content to help it rank higher in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
You can then manage all of your keyword lists through the Semrush Keyword Manager Tool. This tool enables you to inspect your keywords further as well as select them to send to other tools in the Semrush software like the Position Tracking Tool (mentioned next) and the PPC Keyword tool.