How I Do Keyword Research (Secret Tips Inside)

Keyword Research Secrets that Most SEO Gurus Don’t Tell You

Atif Sharif

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Published in

Doctor of SEO

5 min readDec 27, 2023

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How to Do Keyword Research — image made with Canva by Author

I have been working on SEO for almost 7 years, and I have learned from this experience that keyword research is the main key to achieving a higher rank in Google and gaining traffic.

Today, I will share with you a very secret tips that is easy to follow and will help you rank in less time.

However, it’s crucial to remember that there are many other factors in SEO, such as on-page and off-page considerations, that should be taken into account for ranking. Ensure you do it right yourself.

There are many free and paid keyword research tools available in the market but I use Ahrefs because it is the only tool that I use in my daily research to find low-competition keywords.

In this article, we’ll guide you through a step-by-step process on how to conduct effective keyword research using Ahrefs.

1. Log in to Ahrefs:

If you’re not already a user, sign up for an Ahrefs account. Once logged in, navigate to the dashboard.

2. Access the Keywords Explorer:

Locate the “Keywords Explorer” tool on the Ahrefs dashboard, a central hub for all your keyword research needs.

Don’t add any keywords to it. Set the location as I set the United States. Choose where you want to rank and simply click on the Search button.

All keywords are shown as below,

As you can see, the Ahrefs filters allow you to set your niche keyword. For example, if your niche is ‘dog,’ then write ‘dog’ and select Lowest DR (DR means Domain Authority).

Write 5 in Lowest DR Section; I use 5 because if a website with the lowest Domain Authority is ranking in the top 5 for that keyword, it indicates that the keyword is easy to rank in Google. You can choose a number less than 5 or more according to your needs.

Don’t use any other filters like KD (Keyword Difficulty) because KD does not matter or any other because we only use the lowest DR filter to find our low-competition keywords.

I write ‘dog’ in the include filter and set 5 as the value for the lowest DR filter. After that, click apply to see the results shown below

The results shown are mind-blowing because we’ve gathered an extensive list of 70,272 low-competition, high-search-volume keywords to use for our blog or Medium posts.

Now, we can analyze each keyword one by one by clicking on them. For example, I click on “dog boarding near me” which has a search volume of 127k in the United States and a CPC of $1.31. The results are shown below.

As you can see, the keyword is super easy to rank, and its search volume is very good. So, if you are in the dog niche, this keyword is super easy to target and make money from.

As you can see, only a DR 2 website is on #2 ranking for this specific keyword, “dog boarding near me”.

If you target this keyword in your post title , description and in article body then use proper on-page SEO, you have a better chance to rank in Google.”

You can see that the site is super simple with less content, and content is the key to rank #1.

Therefore, you can create high-quality content on this topic and easily outrank this website.

Final Thoughts

Keyword research is vital for Google ranking. Use Ahrefs, set filters wisely, and find low-competition keywords, build some niche relevant backlinks using outreach or guest posting if necessary. Craft quality content to outrank competitors. That’s the secret to success!

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