How to Find a Keyword with a High Search Volume
This is the ultimate Post in our keyword research series.keyword research and that i showed you a couple of cool ways to get thousands of great keyword ideas. This post is all about measuring keyword difficulty then targeting those you actually have a high chance of ranking for in Google’s top 10 search results.
So, let’s jump right in. So for our first example, I’ll attend Keywords Explorer and sort in supplements. Now, I touched on the keyword difficulty metric here partially one among this series, but I didn’t go too in-depth. And that’s because this section here is meant to only offer you a top level view of how hard it'll be to rank on Google for this target keyword. And you'll see that it's a keyword difficulty score of 77 and it says that i want 291 websites to rank within the top 10 for this keyword. But is that basically so? mmmm... Not necessarily.
This part here, where it says you’ll need 291 links from different websites to rank in the top 10 isn’t an excellent crazy algorithm. We just take a weighted average of the highest 10 Google rankings. Also, something that keyword difficulty doesn’t take into consideration are on-page factors, relevance of the subject , and if the backlinks are dofollow or contextual. So the best thanks to gauge the problem of a keyword is to seem at the highest 10 Google rankings, manually examine the standard of their backlinks and see what they’re doing. And you'll see all of this information by scrolling right down to the SERP overview.
Now, if you check out the highest 10 search results, you might be a touch confused. Vitamin Shoppe ranks quite high with only 4 referring domains, ODS or the Office of Dietary Supplements ranks below that even though they need thousands of referring domains. And looking even further below that, this page has just but 20 referring domains, yet keyword difficulty said that we'd like almost 300 unique linking websites.
So what gives? One word: relevance! When you check out the highest ranking pages, you’ll see that the bulk of them are eCommerce pages, which shows that there’s an honest chance that someone checking out the keyword phrase supplements, is looking to buy . Now, watching this result from ODS, you’ll see that it’s a home page where people have to navigate to seek out what they’re trying to find .
And during this case, i might suspect that this isn’t really what people are trying to find . And albeit the page might not perfectly match the searcher’s intent, they still rank quite high because they only have way too many backlinks compared to the opposite ranking sites. For the opposite site down here that has very few unique sites linking to them, you’ll see that they match what i think is that the searcher’s intent for this keyword, which you can see is an eCommerce category page. If you’re new analyzing keyword difficulty, then which may are a touch heavy. So let me review this quick keyword difficulty process fast. First, look for a keyword phrase in Keywords Explorer. Second, I’ll scroll right down to check out the top 10 search results and appearance at the raw number of referring domains.
And if you notice something like this one that has vastly more referring domains, but ranks less than ones like these that have less unique linking websites, then check out the titles and visit the pages to urge a far better understanding of how Google tries to serve the searcher's intent. And we already know that these are ecommerce categories, which shows that there's likely some quite intent to buy when people look for supplements. And this goes to prove that just using the referring domains alone to measure keyword difficulty isn’t always the foremost reliable either.
Let’s check out another example. If I check out the highest 10 search results for the search query, how to write down a canopy letter," you’ll see these results. And apart from SERP features, the highest ranking page has 55 referring domains, and therefore the one down here from Wikihow, has 209 referring domains. And if we glance at the titles, both seem to be perfectly relevant to what a searcher would be trying to find . Now, this is often where you'd got to take an extra step and research the websites that are linking to those pages. So, if we glance at Up to Work’s homepage, it looks like they provide a resume building tool, which suggests that the remainder of the content, and this text on cover letters is going to be closely associated with employment.
Now, I won’t even bother getting to Wiki how’s homepage since I’m sure you recognize they write about basically anything on the way to topics. Let’s check out their link profiles. I’ll click on the respective numbers and open the referring domains reports in new tabs. First, I’m going to set this to the Dofollow filter to find only the value passing links. Finally, I’ll sort the domain rating in ascending order. This is going to help us to spot potentially spammy links. And you can see that there’s one here that looks like an IP address and then there’s another blogspot one here.
But scrolling through the remainder of the results, you'll see that they are available from some pretty relevant websites. And if I expand the backlink report here on something like The Oddyssey Online, you can see that it's a perfectly good editorial link. In fact, the page linking to it is an article about writing a cover letter that gets you hired. And the same goes for this one from wework.com. The article is on the way to make a standout resume and searching at the anchor and surrounding text, the context of the link says that you need to know how to write a good cover letter. Now let’s look at WikiHow’s links.
I’ve already applied the same Dofollow filter and sorted these in ascending order. And as you can see, the first 70 or 80 referring domains come from spammy blogspot sites. But, if we go to page 2, you can see that they do have some perfectly good links in here, which is probably why they rank in the top 10, but in my opinion, it looks like the first ranking page has more solid links from other relevant domains in their space. The last thing I want to touch on is a bit more of an advanced technique, and that’s SERP volatility. Even if you’re a complete beginner to keyword research, I’m going to give you such vivid examples that ought to offer you plenty useful . So, if we go back to our first example on the keyword, supplements, and scroll down the page, you’ll see this graph called SERP position history.
This graph shows you the position history for the pages that currently rank within the top 5 for a given keyword. Now, once you check out this graph, you'll see how volatile the rankings are particularly for the orange line and the green line. Now, if we click on the corresponding check boxes here to remove them from the graph, then you’ll see that the opposite top ranking pages are more stable as of the past few months. What’s even more interesting here is that the ones that are jumping from completely invisible to a top 10 ranking are all non-ecommerce category pages. This is basically telling us how satisfied Google is with the current rankings. If they’re consistently promoting and demoting new pages in and out of the highest 10 results, there’s likely some quite indication that the present ranking results aren’t properly serving search intent.
Now, compare this graph to our other example on how to write a cover letter, and you’ll see that the position history may be a lot more stable here apart from the red one, which just looks like they’ve been actively building links and progressively ranking higher in Google. One final example I want to show you is for the query cars vs. best cars.If you look at the query for a cars, the SERP positions have been super volatile.But look at the different ranking pages. There’s a couple of that are clearly about automobiles, on the other hand there’s also top ranking pages from IMDB, Wikipedia and Disney which are talking about the movie Cars.
So clearly, the searcher’s bent this question can go either way. But take a look at the history for the search query, â best cars. When someone types this in, they’re clearly trying to find reviews or comparisons on different vehicles.
And as expected, the SERP results seem to be quite stable, so this tells me that Google seems to be satisfied with the results they’re showing here. So analyzing the position history of the highest 5 rankings may be a good extra measure to require before selecting your keywords because it tells you a lot about how Google views the searcher’s intent and you ought to know directly , whether you'll serve that intent or not.So as you'll see, keyword difficulty can’t be summed up into variety .
You need to research the highest 10 ranking pages to urge a full view of the number and quality of unique backlinks. You need to know the searcher’s intent behind a keyword so once you create your piece,you can match the searcher’s intent. From there, you'll pick and choose the keywords which will drive plenty of valuable traffic to your website. That’s it for this keyword research series.So keep grinding away, and I’ll see you in the next Post.
