Easy Work Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. By researching your market's keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole.

It's not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated; with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are actively seeking. In the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry in understanding the motivations of consumers in virtually any niche.

How to Judge the Value of a Keyword

How much is a keyword worth to your website? If you own an online shoe store, do you make more sales from visitors

searching for "brown shoes" or "black boots"? The keywords visitors type into search engines are often available to webmasters, and keyword research tools allow us to find this information. However, those tools cannot show us directly how valuable it is to receive traffic from those searches. To understand the value of a keyword, we need to understand our own websites, make some hypotheses, test, and repeat—the classic web marketing formula.

Keyword Difficulty

Unquestionably, the best possible way to gauge the ranking difficulty of a keyword is to manually analyze the search results and use your SEO experience (and gut feeling).

I have covered that whole process, start to finish, in a separate article: How To Gauge Keyword Difficulty And Find The Easiest Keywords To Rank For.

But that is something that you can’t do at scale for thousands of keywords at once. That’s why the keyword difficulty metric is so handy.

Each keyword research tool has their own methods of calculating ranking difficulty score. The one we have at Ahrefs is based on the backlink profiles of the top10 ranking pages for a given keyword. The more quality backlinks they have, the harder it would be for you to outrank them.