All right, so let's just get straight into it. So, the first technique that we're going to use is not that scientific, but if you're looking for a free way to get keyword research fast, then this is a great way to do it. And basically all you need to do is just start off in Google. So on Google, let's say you have a cryptocurrency website. You can basically look at the autofill suggestions. So if you type in "cryptocurrency," you can see what other people are searching for, just from the list on Google. Now, this isn't gonna give you specific search volumes, unlike the techniques I'll show you later in this video. But at the same time, if you're looking for a free, easy and quick way to do this, then you can easily start finding keywords, just on auto-suggest on Google. So for example, let's say you've got a website about Bitcoin and you want to look for topics that you could potentially write about. Then you could type in "Bitcoin" into Google, just like this. And from here, you've got a long list of relevant search queries to Bitcoin that you could easily start writing content around. And when you do this, you're pretty much mining every single keyword that people are searching for around that particular topic. And actually what you can do, is you could type in "Bitcoin" and then "P" and it'll show all the relevant topics that people are searching for around the letter P. And you could do that for pretty much every single letter of the alphabet and quickly find literally hundreds of keyword search queries that you could go after for your website. Now, I'm not a big fan of this particular method, because even though it's free, it's easy, it's cheap to do, it doesn't give you the specific data. And what I mean by this, is it doesn't tell you how difficult a query is to go after, it doesn't tell you how much competition there is. And you kind of still got a lot of guesswork when it comes to going after content on your website. So, I will come on to more techniques later in this video, that teach exactly how to find search volumes, competition, how to find keywords in a more scientific way. For now, I'm gonna show you some ways that you can still get a lot value out of this. So what you can also do is, if you scroll down to "People also ask," then you can see a bunch of questions that people are asking about, regarding this topic. So when you're writing your content, not only do you go after, say... Let's type in... Not only do you go after Bitcoin price, for example, but then you can see what people are searching for around this particular question. So you can see at the bottom, you've got suggestions on Bitcoin price history. Bitcoin price, Bitcoin price dollar, Bitcoin price prediction, so on. And you could either write a separate piece of content for every single one of these keywords, if you really wanted to delve into a lot of depth, or you could just include these topics inside your content as different headers, as different FAQ's. And then you've got a really comprehensive guide and you know exactly what to write about, when it comes to writing the content around your keyword research. So this technique works, like I say, it's not the best technique in the world. There are better ways, and there are more scientific ways. But if you're just starting out, if you just want a quick list of keywords, if you kind of want a rough idea of what keywords to go after, then this is the ideal way to start it.
Now, another way to get research from Google's data, is to go onto Google trends. So you go on trends. google. com. You can change your location to your wherever you're based. So let's do it for the United States, for example. And then in here you simply type in the keyword you're looking for. So let's go after Bitcoin again. So you can filter the data, how recent you want the data. So you could look in the last hour, the last four hours. Honestly, if you're looking to write SEO content, I would look over the last 12 months, because that'll give you an idea of whether the keyword is seasonal or not. And if it's too seasonal, you might not want to go after it, because you'll only get search volumes in certain parts of the year. And sometimes you're gonna get a lot of search traffic, if you base your keywords around seasonal stuff, and then other days, other parts of the months, you're not gonna get any traffic at all. So it's not really a reliable way to create your content for SEO. Instead, I would go after keywords that have a lot of search volume all year round. So for example, if you have a seasonal business around gardening, you're gonna notice that your search volume goes up at certain parts of the year and drops at certain parts of the year. But if you have a website around marketing, for example, you may notice that most of the year your search volumes are pretty much the same all year round. So as you scroll down and we look at the results for Bitcoin on Google trends, we can see that obviously the last few months have been crazy for cryptocurrency and therefore, the search volumes have gone up like so much. So you can see like this time last year, in comparison, there was barely any search traffic. Now, these numbers on the left, are not specific search volumes. This doesn't mean 25 people are searching for that particular keyword. What it does mean, is that for the search volumes, this is 100%, so the absolute max of search volume in the last 12 months, and this is the kind of lowest end of search volume. So you can see, the search volumes for Bitcoin were lowest in May last year. And they were highest in January. And now they're just going up as well. And then you can also check by sub region. So if you're trying to target specific areas, you can see right, Hawaii, California, Nevada, they have the most search volume for Bitcoin. And as you keep scrolling down, you can also see related topics and related queries. So, the cool thing is, that not only do you get information on the search time you're looking at, but you can also get loads of related queries, which you could also go after for keyword research. And you can actually download them here. You can see which keywords are trending. So, when it says "Rising," it basically means which keywords are gathering more momentum and gathering more search volume. But if we hit "Top" over here, these are the top queries and keywords that people are searching for right now around Bitcoin. And you can tailor this to whatever niche you're in. So you could type in, let's say you're in the pools niche, you could type in "swimming pools" there or "marketing" if you're in the marketing niche. But, it's a very easy and quick way to get keyword research that's really gonna help you and your business. Now, next up... You can actually scroll through these queries and download them all as a CSV so that you can import them into Google sheets and basically quickly build up a list of keywords. So as you're gathering all the keyword data for your website, it's important to make sure you have a document where you`re tracking all the keywords that you've found so far, so that you don't lose track of where you are and you can keep up to date with your progress. Okay, so the cool thing is, once you've imported the data onto Google Sheets like this, you can just put in your title, and track where you're up to with your keyword research. So you've got the date here. And then you've got two different lists. So you have a list of the top search queries that are trending right now. And also the list of keywords that are going up in search volume. So these particular keywords are gathering more momentum, they're getting more traction and they're trending. So you could write topics and keywords around these particular keywords, as well as the top ones. So already, in the space of a few minutes, you have like 53 keywords from Google Trends, just by typing in Bitcoin. So it is an extremely easy way to get free keyword research fast. And it doesn't really take much work or technical knowledge. And what you can also do is, you see these "Related topics," you can click into them and find even more keywords to go after. So you can really delve deeply into keyword research via Google Trends and it'll give you loads of data. The only thing it doesn't give you, again, is search volume, and it doesn't give you competition either. So you don't really know, okay, if you create content around this particular keyword, will it rank on Google? Will you get to the first page or are your competitors just gonna outrank you from day one? And therefore, there's no point going after it. So that's what I'm gonna show you in the next section, which will teach you exactly how to do keyword research on Ahrefs, and this is probably one of the most powerful tools out there right now for SEO keyword research. So let's move on.
So if you go to ahrefs. com, you can get a seven day free trial for like $7. And I can pretty much promise you that, from my own experience, if you invest that $7, you'll get a great return in terms of the keyword research, the quality, getting all the statistics and data that you need, and also just saving yourself a lot of time. So if you value your time move than $7, it's probably worth signing up, and you pretty much get what you pay for. I don't make any money from promoting this but it's just one of my favorite tools for SEO. So (laughs) I talk about it a lot. And so if you sign in, like this, once you've created your account and you go to "Keywords Explorer." Now this section on Ahrefs is dedicated purely to keyword research. So, what you can do, is you can type in your particular keyword. Let's stick to our Bitcoin example. Select the region that you're in. Select the search engine that you're going after. So if you have an e-commerce store, you could type "Amazon." If you have a YouTube channel you could type in "YouTube" there, or for SEO, just click on "Google." Type in your keyword, hit "Search," like this. And in the space of a few seconds you've got tons of data on your main topic keyword. Now, the thing is, usually, when it comes to keyword research, your main topic, like your number one keyword, is going to be extremely competitive, because that's what everyone else goes after. And if everyone's doing that, it's gonna get competitive, you've got everyone else to compete with, you've got all your partners, all your competitors. Everyone else on Google is trying to rank for that particular keyword. So usually, if you type in a short keyword like "Bitcoin," for example, the keyword difficulty, which you're given here, is gonna be crazy hard, and there's just no point going after it. And as you can see, this is on a scale from 0 to 100. 100 being the highest, 0 being the lowest. And as you can see right now, the keyword difficulty for this particular keyword is 98. So it's super hard to rank for. You need an insane number of backlinks to rank for that particular keyword. So it's not really worth going after. But the beauty of this tool, is that you get so many other keywords that you can potentially rank for. And that's what I'm gonna show you. So even though you can't rank for Bitcoin, it's gonna be almost impossible, unless you build an insane number of high quality backlinks, what you can do, is if you hit "Phrase match" over here, you will get a ton of keywords. I mean, literally thousands of keywords. You can see there's 550,000 keywords that you could potentially rank for in this particular niche. So you get tons of ideas. Now, that's gonna seem overwhelming, that figure. I mean, I feel overwhelmed look at it. 559,000 keywords. But what you can do is filter those down to maybe just 100, 200. And I'm gonna show you exactly how to do that, so you can filter down a list of low competition, high search volume keywords that your potential customers are looking for, so that you can start ranking and producing content around these keywords and get your website to the first page of Google. So, the first thing we're gonna do is filter down the keyword difficulty. Because the less a difficult keyword is to rank for, the easier it's gonna be to rank. It's not rocket science. So, as I noted before, this KD goes from 0 to 100. 100 is the highest, 0 is the lowest. Honestly, 0 keywords, it might sound like the best idea just to go after them, but I would say between 0 and 10 is best. From my own experience of ranking websites, my agency, when we do keyword research for clients, this is the easiest way to find low competition keywords. And if it goes from 0 to 10, it doesn't matter how authoritative your website is or how little authority you website has. You can rank for keywords at a 0 to 10. I see it all the time with new websites. So, let's put 0 here. Let's put 10 here. Let's hit "Apply" like this. And from here, you've already got 2925 keywords that you could potentially rank for. So even though we filtered all of those keywords to the literally the easiest keywords that we could rank for, as you can see, there's so many keywords that you could rank for. Even in a crazy competitive niche like Bitcoin. So, as you scroll down the list, you can make a note of which keywords you could rank for. Now, for me personally, I'm never going to produce like 3000 pages of content. I just don't have the resources or the time to do that. And if you're the same, if you're a website owner and you don't have the resources or the time and you just want to cherry pick the best keywords to go after, keep watching, because I'll show you exactly how. So next up, you want to fill that out, the search volume. Now, search volume basically means, how many people are searching for this keyword, each month? If nobody's searching for a keyword, there's no point going after it, because you won't get any traffic to your site. Nobody's gonna click it. Nobody's gonna see your content, and nobody's gonna find it on Google. So instead, you have to type in a minimum amount of search volume, to make sure that you can rank for it, and make sure that you get traffic to your site. So in the minimum I would recommend going after is 100. And that filters out all the crazy low volume keywords that there's no point going after. So, we filtered that down to 100 to max. Now what you're gonna do is get a list of keywords that are low competition. As you can see here, all the keyword difficulty for these keywords is less than 10 and the volume is still pretty decent. And we still have 400 keywords that we could potentially rank for. So this is super easy. And then if you're really feeling a little bit adventurous, if you want to delve into more depth into this keyword research, then what you can also do is change the word count. So you could say... All right. Let's see, if we fill this to 1000, like that. 1000 max. This is gonna give you a list of keywords that have a low word count. Now what you can also do, is you can filter out keywords that you don't want to be associated with. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, there may be some keywords that you don't want to rank for. Like for example, anything adult related, anything that seems slightly risky or dodgy or spammy. So for example, in the Bitcoin niche, okay. Maybe you're only in the US, you only sell to US customers. So therefore, you want to exclude any keywords that are around China. So you can exclude keywords that include the word "China," in this list. And we've gone from 438 keywords to 436. So you can exclude certain regions. You can exclude certain things. And what you can also do is include certain things too. So let's say you're in exchange in cryptocurrency, and you only want people who are ready to buy cryptocurrency and ready to buy Bitcoin. What you can do, and this may filter (laughs) out everything, is include the word buy. And now you can see that there are all these keywords around people who want to buy Bitcoin. So if you have a website that's selling any products, any services, and you just want to filter customers who are ready to buy, who've got the credit card out and literally looking for services and products to buy, then you can include certain money keywords next to your phrase keyword. This basically says to Ahrefs, give me a list of keywords that are around my topic, Bitcoin, and include the word "buy" and exclude the word "China," because I don't sell to customers in China. And on this list, you've got "buy Bitcoin at Walmart," "buy Bitcoin with visa gift card," "buy Bitcoin in Hawaii," for example. And you can see these are all low competition keywords, they all have a decent search volume. And these are money keywords that you could use to get more leads, more sales and more profit from your website. So that's the beauty of Ahrefs, you can really filter deep down into the keywords you want to rank for, in a more methodical and scientific way, versus Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner, or anything else that's openly available. So the next thing that we're gonna look at is something called "Clicks." Now, what Click means, is that when people search for a particular keyword, they don't click on all the results on that page. In fact, some keywords don't get any clicks at all, because people find the information they're looking for, maybe with a snippet on Google's first page, which means that they don't click any results from the search rankings. They're not interested in reading further into that particular answer. And therefore, they just go to the page, they type the keyword, they get the information straight off Google's first page, and they don't even look at any websites or blogs. So, it's important that when you're searching for keywords, you look at what gets clicks. So what you can do is click on "More filters," like this. Hit "Clicks," like this. And just make sure there's a minimum number of clicks. So let's say 100. So if we fill out the clicks from 100 to max, we can see there's 16 keywords. If we remove the filter, there's 24 keywords. And what that means, is that 8 of the keywords in this list don't really get any clicks from Google. Which means, if you spent time creating content around those particular keywords, you won't get any clicks from Google, you won't get any search volume. And even if you rank to number one for that particular keyword, it doesn't matter. No one's gonna click on it. So, be really careful about making sure not only do you get low competition keywords, not only do they have search volume, but also that they get clicks from Google. And the thing is as well, if we type in "Bitcoin price" into Google, and we look at the search features, you can see, for example, Bitcoin price, the information the user is looking for is straight on the page from Google. They don't need to click into price indexes or charts. They've got the Bitcoin price right there, which means chances are, most people who type in this keyword will see the information they're looking for right here. And they won't click on any of the websites ranking number one. So sometimes you have to be really careful with keyword research because it doesn't matter if you rank number one. It doesn't matter if you're on the first page. If there's nobody clicking from Google to your website, then you're wasting your time. So save yourself a few months of frustration and make sure you check that metric before you create any content. And this is why keyword research is so crucial for your website, because if you don't do it properly, you can waste a lot of time. You can spend a lot of money creating content and you can spend months of frustration wondering, "Why am I not ranking?" Or, "Why am I not getting search volume?" When really, it's because you didn't do the keyword research properly. So you really have to reverse engineer this process first, before you start creating content. So next up. One thing that I would recommend as well. And if we go back to our CoinDesk example. We'll hit that into Ahrefs like this. It's checking, okay, what are your competitors ranking for? And how can you reverse engineer their success, so that you could potentially outrank them on Google as well, or steal some of their search volume? And the beauty of this is that it only takes about two minutes to do, but it means that you're playing a zero sum game. Because if you steal search volume from your competitors, then not only are you gonna get more search volume, but your competitors are gonna get less. So it's a zero sum game. You're gonna be winning and monopolizing the market. And every keyword that you take from your competitor, is gonna be a win for you. It means all the customers that were buying from your competitors before, are now buying from you, and therefore, you've got two wins. You've got more search volume and you've stole search volume from your competitors. So you win-win all around. So, if we look at CoinDesk's Organic Keywords, we can see what they're ranking for already. The keyword difficulty, again. The traffic per keyword, and what pages they've created for that particular keyword. So again, what we can do is filter this down to KD 10. And here you will see all the low competition keywords that this competitor is ranking for, that you could get search volume from as well. So, if we look at "Bitcoin crash," for example, we can see CoinDesk were ranking number one, for this particular keyword. They get 20,000 volume per month. It's a keyword difficulty of 2, which means it's super low competition. There's a decent amount of traffic going from the amount of people search to the amount of clicks to your website. And they're ranking number one. And then you can also see the URL that this particular website is using to rank for that keyword. So if we hit that, then we can see, what's the domain rating? How many backlinks have they got? What sort of organic search traffic are they getting? And this is such a useful feature because then you can see, "Can I beat my competitor? Can I outrank them? Can I produce a similar piece of content and rank higher than this particular competitor?" Now, the reason I'm sharing CoinDesk is that they're such an authoritative website. It will be very difficult to outrank them. I mean, if we look at "Bitcoin crash," for example, yes, they get 2500 traffic, yes, it's a low competition keyword, but they have built an absolute ton of backlinks to this one page on their site. Plus they're a very authoritative site too. So it would be very difficult to outrank this competitor. But if you're in a less competitive niche, or if you can find smaller websites that you can out-compete, then that's an opportunity for your business. And that's an opportunity for SEO, to start ranking higher and start ranking number one on Google. Now, what you'll also notice quite often most of the time, is that when you're researching what pages are your competitors ranking for on Google? Then, the pages that they're ranking number one in, usually have a lot of backlinks. So keyword research is crucial for your site. It's absolutely essential before you create any content. But at the same time, you need backlinks to your site. And this is why literally hundreds of clients have hired me to build backlinks for the website, because I know exactly how to do the keyword research. But also, I know how to get them links that will help them rank number one on Google. So yeah, be very wary of not just producing content around low competition keywords and checking the search volume, checking the clicks, but also check out how many backlinks has that particular competitor got to their page. And as you can see, this page has 380 backlinks, and unless you spend a serious amount of money on link building, you're not going to outrank them. So be wary of that before you start jumping in and creating content.
