How to make your own keyword research: Metrics

Andrew wanted to know the reason why his website was not receiving visits. He had done it all: bought the domain and hosting, hired an expert to install WordPress and its plugins, opened up social media accounts, and started posting content daily, all this apart from what it takes to run a day-to-day business. But he forgot one thing: To make “keyword research”.

He did everything necessary, or at least logically correct in order to have his inbound strategy working, yet no one visited his business’ website.

When he wrote us, we checked that he had everything well, that’s the first thing, then we checked his content, and we noticed that he had produced quite a few articles, even with adequate images and links.

We did keyword research and found the problem:  Andrew had his page competing for keywords that bring little or no traffic. We followed the steps to do a complete checkup, we suggested changing some words, adding and eliminating others.

Why Making Good Content Is Not Enough

Soon after, the results could be seen, two weeks later his company was ranking in the first 100 places for at least 20 important keywords for his business.

In a few months, and following his content and linkbuilding strategy, Andrew’s business was already at the top of the search results, with at least 5 words.

He thought that just generating quality content was enough, but he did not know that the algorithms work searching for a “match” between the words that users enter into the search engines, and those found on his page.

We always recommend using tools that allow you to determine which keywords are the most appropriate for both search pages and users to find you.

Among the tools available to analyze keywords are: Semrush, Moz, Ubersuggest, and the favorite of the moment: Ahrefs. For people who are not used to working with SEO metrics, these tools can be very confusing, and hard to understand. Added to this is the fact that almost every tool uses its jargon and acronyms to refer to a certain value, which is why we found that for Moz the value of a domain is called Domain Authority (DA), and for Ahrefs that same value is called Domain Rating (DR).

Metrics Ahrefs Provides for Keyword Research

Let’s talk about the metrics used to detail keyword values by the most popular and accurate tool known today: Ahrefs. To start with a keyword analysis we must enter the Keywords Explorer tab, once there we will place the list of keywords that we want to investigate. We can choose by search engine and country. Once we click on the magnifying glass icon we can see the results, most of the scales are from 1 to 100.

KD – Keyword Difficulty: Indicates how competitive this keyword is among the web pages of the topic. The recommendation is to focus efforts on words with little difficulty, but that is related to the topic of your business. But in other cases, it will be necessary to fight for the first positions of the words with the highest KD because they are the ones that your audience uses.

Volume: Indicates how many searches per month, in the selected country, users make with the said word in the search engine. They take into account the statistics of the last 12 months. It is convenient for you to look for the words with the greatest Volume, and discard those that have zero or very little.

TP – Traffic Potential: Of the total searches per month, it is the number of users who finally clicked on the first shown result. This means that if you manage to position that word in the first place, you may achieve that amount of monthly traffic.

GV – Global Volume: It is the total number of searches made for that keyword in all the regions of the world. If your site covers other countries or languages, then your potential traffic increases according to what each of them contributes.

CPC – Cost per click: This number, expressed in local currency, indicates what it would cost to pay for an ad with that keyword. For reference use only, an organically positioned word saves you that amount of money.

And now what?

After selecting the keywords, it is time to start using them in all your content: blog, backlinks, guest posts, ads, social media posts, etc. This is how you will begin to notice the difference in your website’s visits.