SEO tools and tricks (further research)

This section covers information on different useful SEO tools and tricks that will help you with further research. 

Competitors 

Look at what’s working for your competitors. Pop the domain your site into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Competing domains. 

Open

Find the competitors and go to the Content gap section. Paste the link of one of the competing domains and hit ‘Show keywords’ to find out the keywords your site does not rank for. Make sure to choose the country of your target audience – United States, South Africa, Australia, etc. 

These are the topics your site does not rank for so they might be a perfect choice for the article. 

Open

Pop the domain your site into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Top Pages report. This shows you a list of the most popular content on that site when it comes to organic traffic.

There’s your inspiration for topics—the keywords and phrases associated with these pages have already proven themselves to be popular, so they’re likely to be great topics to write about yourself. However, make sure that your site does not have the page for these topics.

Another shortcut to content ideas: enter your term into Keywords Explorer and use either the Phrase Match or Questions report. Both these reports will pull a big list of keyword ideas for you.

Now, all you need to do is shop around a little and look for the topics that interest you. 

Google autocomplete results 

It’s time to delve deeper into the more granular searches people make in relation to what you write about. A simple way to start is to look at Google autocomplete results. It might help you to understand the search intent better and find some more related topics. Also, you can use these suggestions to craft a perfect article outline. 

Go to Google and begin typing a query in the search box, but don’t hit Enter. Google will immediately suggest some additional search terms that people have used:

You can repeat this step and get more results by adding each letter of the alphabet:

If this sounds like a major hassle, head over to Keywords Explorer and check out the Search suggestions report. This report effectively automates the process and shows keywords generated by Google autocomplete alongside valuable SEO metrics like monthly search volume and Keyword Difficulty.

If you’re interested in learning the questions people ask (and search for), check if there’s a “People also ask” box in the Google results…

… or check the Questions report in Keywords Explorer:

… and the “Searches related to” area at the bottom of the search results.

Communities and social networks 

Expand your keyword list by looking literally anywhere else.

• Forums: There are quite a few communities where your target audience discuss popular topics.

• Quora/Reddit: Quora is probably not the first place that comes to mind when you’re looking for travel advice, but you’d be surprised by the amount of information you can find there even on this topic. Where it comes to Reddit, the adage that there’s a subreddit for everything is generally true.

• Facebook Groups: There are groups for almost everything.

Explore different user-generated content platforms like Reddit, Quora, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Look at what people are talking about and which threads are the most popular. You can even filter and sort by the top threads of all time.

Content Explorer tool

Want to take things a step further? Enter Content Explorer.

Content Explorer provides one of the quickest and most reliable methods to understand the most popular and engaging in a given field. For instance, we entered the topic ‘african names’. 

Notice how we used the filters to find pages that get a substantial amount of search traffic even though they only have a handful of links? This allows us to quickly identify relevant popular topics that should be easy to rank for.

We can even see the keywords for which each of these pages ranks by hitting “Details” dropdown.

Content Gap tool 

Do some digging and research the kind of things that the top‐ranking results mention. You can do this with Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool. Research the primary keyword and find the top 3-5 pages that rank for it. E.g., keyword ‘sipho maseko’:

Simply paste a few of the top‐ranking pages into Content Gap like so…

IMPORTANT: Leave the bottom field blank. Use the “Prefix” mode for all URLs.

… then hit “Show keywords.” You should see something like this:

Notice that these words and phrases aren’t synonyms but rather topically‐related terms. 

What to do: 

Include semantically‐related words and phrases to increase the “relevancy” of your page and help Google understand that your page is the best result for your target keywords.

Long-tail keywords 

Long-tail keywords are “unpopular” (i.e., low Volume) and highly-focused search queries that tend to convert exceptionally well.  ~1.9 billion keywords in Ahrefs’ US database showed that a whopping 92.42% of them get ten searches per month or fewer.

There’s a common misconception among SEOs that shorter search queries have higher search volumes than longer ones. You can’t (and shouldn’t try to) determine Keyword popularity by looking at the number of words in a query. Short search queries can be “long-tail” keywords, and long queries can be “head” keywords.

One of the easiest ways to find long-tail keywords is to take a broad topic and begin typing it into Google. You will then see Google autocomplete suggestions, “People also ask” box, “Searches related to…”, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer (Phrases matches, Questions). 

Long-tail keywords tend to be easier to rank for than “head” keywords.

For example, look at the top-ranking pages for the long-tail keyword “turmeric weight loss” (2,500 monthly searches):

Here, most of the top-ranking pages have fewer than 20 referring domains.

Translation: If you were to create a page on this topic and build some links to it, you could expect to rank in the top 10 quite easily.

Now let’s compare this to a popular “head” term like “weight loss” (98,000 monthly searches):

This time, all of the top-ranking pages have tons of backlinks. Your chances of outranking them are slim.

So as a general rule, it’s easier to rank for and get traffic from long-tail keywords.

Please note that some of the long-tail keywords are part of a broader topic. E.g. Here are a handful of the top-ranking pages for “how can I lose some weight”:

It’s clear that these pages are quite generic. None of the titles contain the phrase “how can I lose some weight,” so Google must group this query as part of the broader overall topic of losing weight.

You can take your analysis a step further by throwing the keyword into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and checking the Parent topic.

If the Parent topic is a more popular keyword, it’s another telltale sign that your keyword is part of a broader topic. Never target these kinds of long-tail keywords separately. You’ll waste your time because Google views all of them as being part of a broader topic. Instead, target each long-tail keyword that is not a part of a broader topic with a unique page.

Here’s an example of such a keyword:

If we check the top-ranking pages in Google, we can see that all of the pages are highly-focused on this topic. Just look at the titles.

Furthermore, if we throw the keyword into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, we see that the Parent topic is the same.

Same goes if we check the Top keyword for the top-ranking pages in the SERP Overview.

It’s clear then that “keyword cannibalization” is not part of a broader topic.