Any successful SEO campaign is founded on keywords. They are what people use in search engines to solve and answer their problems. The aim is for your site to rank for keywords that your quintessential customers are using in searches. So with all things considered, the first step of researching keywords is to find keyword opportunities.

How Do I Know if My Site Ranks for Keywords Already?

Now, how you want to do this will hinge on if your site already has existing organic search traffic or not. Here's how to find out if you have existing organic keywords and search traffic: open SEMrush, enter your domain into the search bar, go to organic research (left tab menu), and look under 'top organic keywords' near the bottom. If you already have some organic keywords, then that's the ideal place to start. It indicates that you're already doing something right.

How to Pick Good Keywords

If there's already a few organic KWs, you'll need to identify easy pickings. These are simply just keywords ranking from #2-15 positions. While in SEMrush, click on the positions tab, and then the positions drop down, and enter 2 and 15 into the custom range. You'll now be able to view all of your "easy pickings" keywords. These are the keywords on which you will need to concentrate. With simple optimization and maybe some backlinks, you can drive these rankings up. You'll begin to see a big rise in organic search traffic this way.

Interesting data: according to a study "Backlinko" conducted, the #1 spot gets approximately 31% of the total clicks for a keyword, while the #5 spot only gets 9% of those clicks.

How Many Clicks Do Top KWs Get?

Google Organic CTR Breakdown by Position

• #1 31.73%

• #2 24.71%

• #3 18.66%

• #4 13.60%

• #5 09.51%

This means that if you go from position #5 to #1, it will produce gigantic gains in traffic. That's why it's such a good idea to put all of your beginning effort on these easy pickings. Next you might also be asking yourself, how do you increase the rankings for these keywords? I'll get to that in a moment.

How Do I Start Getting KWs From Scratch?

What to you do if you have no organic keywords? This might be because you haven't done any SEO yet or you have a brand new website. Here's the steps you need to do: go to SEMrush, on the left tab menu under SEO click on keyword gap. Type your domain and also type a few of your top competitors' domains. If you want to know who your top competitors are in organic search, go to keyword research and keyword overview. Next, type a keyword related to your industry.

For example, if I use 'seo tools' then scroll down to SERP Analysis and refresh the metrics. Here you can see which domains have the most search traffic. Keep this tab open, and on the left tab menu again, under the competitive research section, open keyword gap in another tab (Shortcut: click with Middle Mouse Button or hold Ctrl + click). Type your domain into the first field, then copy and paste a few of your competitors from the prior tab into the other fields of the keyword gap tool, and click Compare.

On the next page, click on the position drop down, mouse over competitors and select "Top 10". Scroll down and look under "All keyword details for". Now you can sort these keywords from miscellaneous options. Two of these options are most interesting. Missing and Untapped are keywords for which one or all of your competitors are ranking but your website is not.

What’s the Secret to SEO?

Now that you know how to find easy keyword pickings if you do or don't have existing organic traffic, let me spill the beans on a secret. Anyone can find keywords; the real trick is knowing how to sift through these keywords and choose specific KWs that are worth going after.

Here are some more things to consider when trying to select keywords. First, what is the searcher's intent? You should always focus on keywords with transactional intent. You know, the ones near the bottom of the sales funnel. The best way to understand this is to know the five main categories of intent:

What are the Five Types of Search Intent?

• Informational

• Investigative

• Comparison

• Transactional

• Navigational

All solid SEO campaigns go after keywords at each stage of the funnel. Let's say you're building a keyword strategy for Esseodigital. At the top of the funnel, Esseodigital would want to target keywords with informational intent such as "What is SEO" or "How to Check if Google Analytics is Working". These keywords are extensive and will drive the most traffic.

The next step of a search journey is to target keywords with investigative intent like "SEO services" or "best SEO service". Take note that this is much more relevant to what Esseodigital offers. At this point the person searching is probably aware of brands, meaning they know about heavy hitters in the SEO services market like Esseodigital. That means they'll probably begin searching keywords with comparison intent such as Esseodigital versus X or Esseodigital reviews.

As you can tell the searcher is getting closer to their decision. They're probably contemplating their options. This brings us to keywords with transactional intent, which in the case of our example, would be something like "Esseodigital services" or "Esseodigital contact". The conversion rate for these keywords would be through the roof.

Finally, the last type of intent is navigational which would just be "Esseodigital". You won't need to spend too much time on these because the branded KWs will just rank on their own. So all things considered, you should always start at the bottom of the sales funnel and work your way up.

How To Know What Keywords To Go For

The next question to ask yourself about your KWs is "can I actually compete for this keyword?" You can use the keyword difficulty tool on SEMrush to swiftly sift through all of your KW opportunities. Type your target domain (or a competitor's domain) into the search bar, then go to organic research on the left menu. Then click the positions tab, and click the KD filter (Keyword Difficulty; not your favorite FPS gamerscore). Set this to very easy just to start off, then work your way up over time.

These are more "easy pickings" keywords you want to single out first because they don't require as much to rank. So in review, you'll want to focus on keywords with high transactional intent and low competition first. There are many more steps that go into keyword qualification and prioritization that we can discuss later. In the next blog we will move onto the second pillar of SEO, Technical.

Esseodigital is a digital marketing service providing agency experience at a freelance price. If you’re interested in boosting your businesses marketing success, please contact us.