How To Do Keyword Research in SE Ranking
In my review of SE Ranking, I mentioned that keyword research has some great features, which I want to show you today.
In this post, you’ll learn how to use SE Ranking to conduct thorough SEO keyword research so you can get new content ideas for your blog or website.
I’ll also share a few methods I use to determine whether a keyword is good for you or not, so stick to the end.
1. Open Keyword Research
First, you need to open the Keyword Research feature on SE Ranking. To do it, click on the “Research” tab in the dashboard (on the left side), and on the extended window, pick “Keyword Research”.
As you can see, there are multiple features inside the keyword research tab, but for now, you don’t need any of that since you already have a field to enter the keyword you want to analyze.
2. Insert The Keyword (topic) You Want to Analyze
Now, it’s time to insert the keyword or the topic you want to analyze. Before we dive into the exact steps, here’s an important feature of SE Ranking: choosing the country.
Here, you should pick the country where you’ll try to rank the keyword in. This is extremely important because, as you probably know, SERPs are different in each country.
For instance, I live in Croatia, and my target audience is the USA, and if I search for something on Google, I’ll get results for Croatia, not for the USA. That can be worked around by using a VPN, but why would I use a VPN when SE Ranking has the feature to check keywords for literally any country in the world?!
For this example, I’ve picked the USA and wrote the keyword on 3d printers:
When you write in the keyword (you can also add multiple keywords at once), just click Analyze and wait for it to check everything.
If you’re still not using SE Ranking, feel free to type your keyword below, and you can start using it immediately:
3. Check Overall Keyword Analytics
Now you’ll get some overall keyword analytics for a specific keyword, such as:
- Keyword difficulty
- Search volume
- Search intent
- Cost per click (for advertisement)
- Global search volume
- Keyword ideas (similar keywords, related keywords, questions)
As you can see from our example, this keyword is pretty difficult to rank for (48/100). Search volume is 3.6k in the USA and 5.1k globally.
4. Check The SERPs
Checking just keyword difficulty itself won’t give you a good overall picture of a specific keyword. We need to check the SERPS so you can see what’s really ranking for that keyword, check their website, their authority, and, in the end, the quality of the content that ranks.
You can do that by scrolling a little bit down until you see the organic results tab.
Here, we see five results from the SERPS and the traffic they get for those pages. But it’s not enough to check only that.
I always dig deeper into detailed organic results reports, which you can do by clicking on “View detailed report”. When you do it, the following window will open:
On this page, you can check the top 100 search results for a particular keyword. More importantly, you can see more information about each website that ranks for your keyword.
Things you can see:
- Page ranking for that keyword
- The total traffic the page gets
- Traffic cost for CPC
- Keywords that the page ranks for
- Domain trust (similar to DA)
- Page trust (similar to PA)
- Amount of backlinks
- Number of referring domains
Straight from this SERP report, you can see that there’s one website ranking on 8th position, and its DT is much lower than the rest, meaning that you can still rank for this keyword even if you’re not Cnet or PCMag.
Now, what I always do is open the first 10 results and check the quality of their content and if I can produce a better piece.
By clicking on the small icon on the left side of the page name, you can check that page and the quality of its content. It’ll open in the new window.
So, here’s what I do:
- Check every page of the top 10 results.
- Analyze the quality of their content and try to find some gaps.
- If I can write better content and not all results are high DT websites, I’ll probably write a post for a particular keyword.
Of course, metrics such as the amount of backlinks and referring domains are also important. If all pages on SERP have hundreds of links, you probably won’t be able to rank without building links to your new page. Luckily, here you can see that some pages without links also rank.
Related: How To Check Backlinks on SE Ranking
5. Check Other Similar Keywords To Find Opportunities
If it happens that the keyword you want to rank for is too competitive, that doesn’t mean that you should give up that keyword completely. What I usually do is check other similar and related keywords and try to find opportunities there.
And then, once you build some authority (and topical authority), then you can potentially write a post for the keyword you wanted to rank for in the first place.
To check other keywords, you should go back to the keyword overview: Research > Overview. Then, you’ll see some keyword ideas like in the image below:
As you can see, we have three categories here:
- Similar keywords
- Related keywords
- Questions
Personally, I always tend to look for similar keywords and questions. Usually, I find some great keyword opportunities there.
You can check each of the reports separately, then find some good keywords, and then again analyze them the way I’ve shown you from step 1 to step 4.
You can do it until you find one or multiple interesting keywords you could rank for.
6. Keyword Suggestions Feature
If you want an even simpler way to find similar keywords, SE Ranking has a feature called Keyword Suggestions. Over there, you can get immediate recommendations for keywords you may want to target.
It’s pretty similar to the one above, but here you get more keyword recommendations, and you also get a new tab: low search volume, so you can find some additional keywords there as well.
To open Keyword Suggestions, click on Research > Keyword Suggestions. The following page will open:
I already marked one interesting keyword, which I would thoroughly analyze and probably write a post about it if I had a website in the 3d printers niche.
If you want, you can also filter keywords by search volume, difficulty, etc. So that might be useful as well.
7. Save Interesting Keywords
While researching keywords, you’ll probably find more interesting keywords that you may want to target.
What I always do while researching is save them into the Keyword Manager list so I don’t forget about them. That way, I can quickly access them through Keyword Manager later on and analyze them again.
To save keywords, just click a “+” sign on the left side of the keyword, and then you can add it to your existing lists or create a new one. Here’s an example:
And that’s how you do it. When you want to access SE Ranking Keyword Manager later, you can access it by Research > Keyword Manager.
There, you’ll be able to open your lists and check keywords that you’ve saved.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, finding new keyword opportunities through SE Ranking is a pretty simple process. Of course, it takes time (I sometimes spend hours looking for new keywords and saving them to lists), but it’s extremely simple.
It’s much easier than doing everything manually through Google or other search engines, especially considering SE Rankings’ competitive pricing.
I have the cheapest subscription, and I can check 100 keywords per day, which I’ve never spent. So, I think it’s more than enough for almost any website, especially for new ones. Theoretically, you can do detailed checks of 3000 keywords per month, which is awesome value.
If you’re still not a user of SE Ranking and don’t want to spend a ton of money on various SEO tools, I suggest that you check out SE Ranking.
They offer a 14-day Free Trial, so you’ll have more than enough time to test their platform out before making a final decision.
