Keyword Research Basics

If SEO is new to you, you may be unsure of what keyword research is and why it is so important.

How Does Keyword Research Work?

Finding useful search terms that your target customers enter into search engines like Google when looking for goods, services, and information is the process of conducting keyword research.

What Makes Keyword Research Important?

You won’t get any traffic from Google if you post a page on a subject that no one is looking for or other search engines.

How to Use Ahrefs and What is Competitor Analysis?

Ahref is an all-in-one SEO toolkit for increasing search traffic and optimizing websites. Ahrefs crawls the web and stores lots of data and it can be accessed through a simple user interface.

Ahref has many tools and features to help you improve your SEO marketing and keyword research. So if you are a beginner and have no experience with SEO tools like Ahref. Review these 7 simple methods.

1. See How Much Search Traffic Your Competitors Getting

Find Out Your Competitor

A simple way to find your competitors is to search for your keywords on Google and look for the site that appears the most on the search results page.

Analyze Their SEO

A Domain Rating with a high DR score indicates that the website has a solid backlink profile. A large number of referring domains can also indicate a strong site. Estimated organic search traffic and keyword rankings are important to analyze competitors.

Visit Competitor Websites

There are many things to look out for such as quality and quantity of content on their sites, keywords, and type of websites and etc.

Check Out Competitor Backlinks

You need to find their anchor text. If some popular sites have any backlinks, you can contact their webmaster to get backlinks from them.

Identity Areas for Improvement

You can take all the information you have gathered about each competitor and better understand what your competitors are doing.

2. Find Out Which Pages Are Bringing Search Traffic to Your Competitors

After you find out how much search traffic your competitors are getting, the next step is to study which of their pages account for the majority of that traffic.

Ahref site explorer can answer this, you can open the Top Pages Report and you will see a list of your competitor’s pages ranked by the amount of search traffic they receive.

By studying your competitor’s best-performing pages you can gain many insights into their marketing and business strategies.

• Which pages bring in most of their search traffic?
• How much search traffic goes to their home pages and other pages?
• How much search traffic do their product pages get?

Studying what works for your competitors can help you make better marketing decisions when planning your own strategy.

3. Study What People Are Searching for on Google

If you’re wondering how to increase your search traffic on Google, first study what people search for in their popular results. This is one of the main keys to increasing your traffic and this ensures that you will create content that many people are looking for in SEO. This process is called Keywords Research. Ahrefs keyword explorer helps you popularize any search query and find thousands of relevant keywords you want to target.

When selecting a particular keyword to target, we tend to look at its monthly search volume as an indication of how much search traffic they are likely to bring. But the search volume of an individual keyword can be misleading. This is because web pages never consider ranking for just one keyword.

4. Estimate the Ranking Difficulty of Any Keyword

Some keywords are incredibly easy to rank for, while others are unattainable even for large, authoritative websites. But how do you know which is which?

Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer has called Keyword Difficulty (KD) score. It scores each keyword on a scale of 0 to 100, with the latter being harder to rank.

5. Find Out Where Your Competitors Got Their Backlinks

One of the most common jobs for an SEO expert is to find out where the top-ranking page got its backlinks from and how to get those same backlinks to their own page.

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer is an absolutely unavoidable tool in such a situation. Take the page that ranks 1 for your desired keyword, insert its URL into the tool, and go to the backlinks report.

6. Track Your Ranking Progress for Thousands of Keywords

Even if it is very new, there is a good chance that your website will rank on Google for many keywords. It doesn’t necessarily rank on the first page, but there are still nine pages of search results hidden away.

The Organic Keywords report in Site Explorer will show you almost all the keywords your website is ranking for on Google.

Using Site Explorer, you can see all the keywords that your competitor ranks for and their ranking history as well. You can add keywords to Ahrefs “Rank Tracker” if you want to keep an eye on them.

7. Find Hundreds of Quality Link Prospects in Seconds

Consider that you are managing SEO for “Nutrition App”. Wouldn’t you find a list of all the websites that have the phrase “Nutrition App” somewhere in their content helpful?

This is so that you can contact them and attempt to bargain for a link on their sites. Ahrefs “Content Explorer” can certainly assist you with it. You can find thousands of sites that use this word somewhere in their content by just searching for a “Nutrition App”.

However, you most likely don’t need that many. Not to worry. With the help of several filters in “Content Explorer”, you can narrow down that list to just include the best pages.

• Domain Rating: 40 to 90
• Website Traffic: From 1k
• Language: English
• Exclude Subdomains, Exclude Homepages, One Page Per Domain, and Filter Explicit Results.

These settings will leave you with 0 to 11.068 pages. And if you need to further reduce your list of link opportunities, you can easily tighten your filtering.

Conclusion

Here are seven simple and extremely effective strategies to use Ahrefs to boost your website’s rankings and success. We believe that after reading this blog, you will have a solid grasp of how to utilize Ahrefs, as well as what competitive analysis is and how to use it.