Beginner’s guide to SEO – Part 2: Semrush Keyword research
This second part of the “Beginner’s guide to SEO” series which uncovers what SEO is and how you can use it to optimise your website. In this part, I’ll show you how I used an SEO tool called Semrush to help optimise this very guide page by finding all the most searched relevant keywords and increasing the visibility of this page website on search engines.
As mentioned in part 1, using the right keywords is very important because it will help bring your website to the top of search results and increase your site traffic and engagement.
Semrush is a Search Engine management tool which can perform advanced search tasks and provide useful site traffic data about your page or website. My step-by-step guide will show you how to use this powerful tool to optimise your website with the best keywords and bring your website to the top of search engine results.
Before starting, it’s important that you register and create an account with Semrush. They have 3 different membership types starting from $119 per year.
- 1. Log in – The first and easiest step, log into Semrush with your account.
- 2. Select keyword magic tool – Once you’ve logged into Semrush (preferably using excel) you can select the “keyword magic tool” button on the left hand side to get started.
- 3. Enter your keyword – Try to enter keywords that are relevant to the title of your page to avoid getting results that produce many unnecessary words and phrases. For example, let’s look at how I got this very title when using the keyword magic tool. As I wanted to make an SEO guide, I decided to type that phrase into the keyword magic tool and then click search.
- 4. Finding relevant keywords – After I clicked search, Semrush showed every Google search with the phrase “SEO guide” in it, making it easier to find the relevant keywords I needed for my page.
- 5. Narrowing down the list – Now that we have a massive list of keywords, we’ll need to narrow it down to the words that are relevant to our page. In my example I selected the “beginners” section from the menu on the right hand side since I wanted my guide to mainly be for first time learners. Selecting this menu also saves time because it provides a shorter and more relevant list of keywords to use.
- 6. Downloading the information – After selecting my list of relevant keywords, I needed a way to download it. On the left hand side there is an “Export” button that will allow you to download your information in 3 different formats. CSV is the best format of the three as it puts the information into an easily readable table.
To sum up, before you begin optimising your page or website, you will need to do some keyword research. Use an SEO tool such as Semrush to find keywords relevant to the site and narrow down the list to words that are more applicable than the rest.
The next part will show you what to do with your downloaded list of keywords.