Using keyword research tools like SEMRush helps you enhance your writing and produce good content. And good content is good marketing. Online, there’s no such thing as good content, without keyword research and optimization.
Who Needs Keyword Research and Why?
There are many misconceptions concerning SEO and keyword research. Some publishers believe that good content is enough to drive traffic – by default. That’s not quite what happens online, unless you are the New York Times and your brand value precedes the quality of the content. Good content brings value for the reader, but without proper optimization for search engines, it may not be found by as many potential readers as it should. A few SEO principles, implemented correctly, may help all publishers at least stay abreast with competitors. Those who choose to ignore basic SEO do so at their peril. Some of the most important brands in the world, including publishers like Forbes, use SEO to optimize, and manage content.
For these brands, using SEMRush for keywords research is part of their business strategy.
Using SEMRush to Optimize Content
There are four main possible uses for SEMRush: to identify organic keywords; to identify search competitors; to see estimated SE and AdWords traffic; and to identify Google AdWords keywords. From these, you draw what is best for your business. You may not use AdWords, but identifying the most powerful AdWords keywords withing a niche is indicative of what competitors believe that drive ready-to-buy visitors to a site.
Keywords are how people find you, whether you like it or not. The first purpose of using SEMRush Pro is to identify which phrases will provide the most search traffic.
The second purpose is to discover keyword variations associated with a root word. This shows exactly how people search. This eliminates the “guessing” and helps identifying user behavior.
SEMRush shows you the average monthly number of searches for each keyword phrase; average price of a click on the AdWords ad for each search query; competition of advertisers in AdWords for each term; how many pages Google knows for each query; and also the top ranking sites for each query in Google, if you click on the specific term to “dig deeper.”
This is massive SEO intelligence, and it will provide the foundation for your keyword expansion, optimization methods and content strategy.
As an example, for content producers like bloggers and journalists, keywords generated with SEMRush are best used to create an Editorial Plan. This helps publishers focus, and also eliminates the dreaded “writer’s block” so many bloggers fear.
The editorial plan should include scheduled publication date; article title; category; keywords (also can be used as tags); and media (images, video, others). A very good example of such a plan is provided by TopRank on Flickr. You can see clearly how the main keywords are used in the title of the article, and how they relate with the blog categories:
A Few Tips
Optimizing content must follow a logical structure. It is not enough to place some keywords in a title, and stuffing them in meta tags will not work – SEO takes more effort. The most important aspect is that your writing should engage the human reader first, but also to help the search engines understand the relevancy of your content.
When you write titles, make them compelling, and try to use your keyword phrases at the beginning, without losing the logical flow of the phrase.
Remember that optimizing for the most popular keyword phrases is enough, and also, that the most popular keyword phrases are the most difficult to compete for. Think long-tail instead, and optimize for longer keyword phrases, that are more descriptive and convert better. This is what “keyword expansion” entails, and you can target variations of your keywords; or add location, brand, price, intent, etc – to drill down the best keywords. Whatever you come up with, it’s vital to keep the keywords relevant to your site.
Last but not least, keyword research is an ongoing strategy, as customer behaviors and market trends change over time. As good as it is, SEMRush alone is not enough, as it doesn’t give insight on mobile users, video optimization, ad intelligence and social media trends. You’ll have to use a suite of keyword research tools, including Google Keyword Tool; Google Webmaster Tools; Google Search Trends; WordStream; Twitter search; YouTube; Facebook and others. But with SEMRush you can make a good start, especially when it comes to identifying who are the major competitors for a given search query and what makes them strong.
About Mihaela Lica Butler
