How to do Keyword Research for Content Ideas Using KWFinder
Keyword research is an amazing way of discovering new content ideas to write about, gaining significant information about your competitors and staying up to date with Google trends.
While there are many famous (and expensive) keyword research tools out there, like Ahrefs and SEMrush, I found that KWFinder offers a simple and cheap solution to small businesses and entrepreneurs that want to stay in the SEO game.
Good news, you don’t have to be an SEO wizard to ace keyword research anymore, because KWFinder offers an elegant and easy solution to your keyword research initiatives.
Keyword Research For Content Ideas
One of the best uses of keyword research is to find and expand your content ideation process.
When doing keyword research for content ideas, your goal is to find the best fitting keywords that have high “monthly search volume” with a medium or low “keyword difficulty”.
High search volume — means that a lot of people search for a specific query each month on Google. Any number higher than 1000 searches is considered a high search volume. However, high monthly search volume terms can be difficult to rank for.
Keyword difficulty — means that the keyword research tool estimates your ability to rank for a specific keyword from 1 to 100. Keyword difficulty numbers are not accurate since they are just search estimations. Any keyword that is above 40 is considered a “medium” to ”high” effort ranking keyword.
Keyword Research Tip for Very Competitive Niches
Try going after low keyword-difficulty keywords, even if the search volume for each keyword is not very high. You might get clicks from users with a specific user intent if you are able to rank for these keywords.
How to do keyword research with KWfinder?
Go to the KWfinder tool. It will give you a comprehensive overview of your specific keyword and other related keywords.
- Type your keyword into the keyword field. In this example, we are using “Moving to Montreal” as a keyword. (You can filter your results by keyword difficulty and search volume with the filter feature)
In our “Moving to Montreal” example, you can see that the search volume is 290 — not very high, but the keyword difficulty is 25 out of 100 — which means that this keyword might be still easy to try to rank for.
2. Take a look at “related keywords” to get more content ideas. Make sure to check the “autocomplete” and “questions section” to see which questions users are looking for. Try to incorporate questions and answers in your articles if they are relevant to your topic.
Competitive Analysis with SERPChecker
Analyze Google search results for your desired keyword to gain a better understanding of your competitors. Looking at search results may give you an insight into how difficult it will be to rank for any keyword.
But how will you know which websites are relatively easy to outrank?
- Go to the SERPChecker tool and enter the desired keyword to check the competition. Click on “Analyze SERP”.
SERPChecker gives you a detailed map view of the top 10 results in Google. Check which kind of websites appear in the top results, while examining DA and PA numbers.
Domain authority (DA)- is the unofficial rank that pages are given to by various SEO tools. The higher the domain authority is, the harder it is going to be “outrank” this website.
Page authority (PA) — is almost the same as domain authority, but it refers to the authority of a specific page. It’s a number that estimates how hard it will be to outrank this specific page.
or our query, “Moving to Montreal”, we can see that the first result is a blog post, with a DA of 29. The second result is a blog post as well, with DA of 60.
The green colors represent the difficulty in “outranking” these search results. We can see that some of the results are orange and red, which means, they will be more difficult to outrank.
Ranking Tip: If the DA of your website is higher than the top results, it means that you might be able to outrank your competitors by investing in content marketing and a good backlink strategy.
Competitor Analysis Assessment
Click on five to six results on the first page in Google for your query. Check out the style of the competitor articles and try to answer these questions:
- What is the writing style of your competitors?
- Are the articles easy to read and understand?
- Is the content long (above 1200 words) or short (below 500 words)?
- Do the competitors use listicles or bullet points?
- How many images are used in each article?
- Do the competitors answer questions for the reader?
To improve your content strategy process, create a table in an excel spreadsheet with answers to these questions.
Use Google Suggestions and Autocomplete
While using fancy SEO tools is very helpful indeed, a lot of hidden keyword opportunities hide in plain sight, in Google’s search results.
Go into the “Incognito” mode in your browser and type your desired search query. Take a look at the search suggestions that appear at the bottom of the page. These might indicate what users might be looking for, and you can include these keyword suggestions in your content strategy document.
Sometimes Google presents a set of questions for random queries. There are popular questions that users might be looking for. If the questions are present, it might be beneficial to include a form of Q&A in your article.
Content Ideation with Keyword Research
Performing SEO keyword research for content ideation and strategy purposes might appear like a lengthy process, but let it not intimidate you. It is a fairly straightforward process that you can learn without being an SEO savant.
Gaining insight into keyword difficulty and search volume numbers will provide valuable information to your content strategy. While assessing competitors will give you an idea about how tough your competition really is for each topic.
Using simple and most importantly, user-friendly tools like KWfinder and SERPChecker will make you the keyword research expert that you always wanted to become.
The article was first published on the SERP Wolf Blog.
