Does the keyword data in Ahrefs make your head hurt? Don't worry, it won't last long. Once you understand how to read the Ahrefs report, it will become one of the most powerful tools you will use at Social5. The keyword report can be found by clicking on "organic keywords" in the lefthand column.
The organic keywords page will show you all search terms that the customer is currently ranking for. An example of this page is included below. First, let's understand the terminology:
Keyword: The search term someone uses when looking for a product or service.
Volume: The monthly average of searches for a given keyword.
Traffic: How many of those searches went to the customer's website.
KD: The difficulty of winning that keyword through our SEO effort. 0=easy 100=hard
CPC: This is the current cost-per-click rate of advertising for that keyword on Google Adwords
Position: Where the customer ranks for that keyword on Google
URL: Where Google is sending that search traffic.
With that in mind, take a look at the list below. Where would we be most likely to make some gains? Let me walk you through some thoughts . . .
- The keyword "property management" has lots of traffic. It's getting 75,000 searches each month. Although it is a highly relevant term with lots of searches it as a KD of 77. That means it is going to be super hard to make gains. We may want to include it as a secondary search term because it's so relevant, but let's not put a lot of effort into that one.
- Now look at the keyword "hoa property management." It has 700 searches. Right now, the company is in position 9 on Google, which is the first page, but has only captured 33 searches. As far as KD is concerned, it is low-hanging fruit with a 12 out of 100. Someone is advertising for the keyword at a cost-per-click of $7.00, but that's OK. It should be included on the list.
- Take a look at the keyword "letter announcing new property manager." It has 80 searches per month. And it's super easy to win. But it really doesn't have much relevance to the industry. Avoid search terms that are going to bring non-qualified traffic.
- One keyword you should go after is "vacation rental franchise." Although the search volume is relatively low at 60 searches per month, this company is in position 12 on Google. If you can move them up two positions, you move to the front page. That could provide a meaningful difference for the business.
See what observations you have . . .
Now let's go through the exercise of selecting keywords. We'll start by evaluating the customer's website. When looking at this data, we consider ways to strengthen existing keywords and drive more traffic. Here's an example of a customer that provides software for sales people. I would choose the following keywords:
guided selling software — relevant, easy KD, low traffic acquisition, room for position gain
guided selling solution — ditto
guided selling solutions — bumped to page 2 of Google, opportunity for reclaiming the first page
guided selling tools — ditto
Those would be the only ones I would use on this search. The rest aren't relevant. In this case, I may actually go to the customer's website and look for some new search terms that I could introduce into the strategy.
(HINT: If you want to introduce a new keyword, you can click on "Keywords Explorer" at the top of the screen to see how much traffic the keyword is getting. The more traffic, the better the keyword.)
Next, you should pull up the keywords that competitors are being found for. Pretend that we are running a smoke shop and Smoker's Guru is our competitor. I would look at targeting the following keywords to pull traffic away from their business. These keywords represent vulnerabilities for that business that we can exploit to generate more qualified searches to our business. I would choose the following keywords:
smokers guru — high volume, easy to incorporate into a blog, easy to win, competitor is losing position.
smoker guru — ditto, except the competitor is two spots away from losing the first page of Google.
kratom utah — modest search volume, easy KD, relevant product.
dab illuminati — relevant search, low competition
Hopefully this generates some ideas of keywords you can use to strengthen your strategy. Feel free to use keywords not found in these searches. Just make sure to test them through "keywords explorer" to ensure that they are receiving adequate search traffic