How to Do Keyword Research: Go Beyond Search Volume

Keyword research is critical for successful SEO. If you’re not targeting keyword phrases that will drive traffic to your website, then you’re wasting your time, effort, and money.

This tutorial is the first of three videos in Ahrefs’ series on how to do keyword research. The keyword research tool used in this video is Keywords Explorer tool.
https://ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer

In part 1/3, you’ll learn both basic and advanced keyword research fundamentals that many people don’t know, think of, or fully understand.

You’ll learn that keyword research goes far beyond “search volume” numbers and see why this metric is not the most reliable one during your keyword selection process.

This video also does a deep dive on searcher’s intent which will reveal that not all searches result in clicks to your website, regardless of the search volumes.

You’ll also learn a low-hanging keyword research tip that will help you identify the best keyword to target based off of any random search query you can think of.

Best of all, you’ll learn that the best way to do keyword research, which is to target topics based on traffic potential.

Throughout the rest of this keyword research tutorial series, we will cover important tactics and strategies that will help you:

- generate thousands of keyword ideas
- measure keyword difficulty to determine whether you can actually rank on Google for your selected terms.

Timestamps:

1:51 What “search volume” is and why you shouldn’t rely on it alone
4:28 “Clicks” section and how to use it for keyword research
6:18 Why you need to know Return Rate metric
7:05 Assess the commercial value of a keyword
9:06 Target “Parent” topic to reach a wider audience
11:31 Use this hack for SERP results feature (focus on the topic)