How to Find The Best Keywords With ‘Ahrefs’ and ‘SEMrush’
Saffron Edge
Apr 2, 2018
11 min read

How to find the right keywords?
Finding the right keywords to rank is crucial as the ranking of your blog/webpage will be based on the keywords targeted through the content wrapped around it. Accordingly, there are many ways to ascertain the aptest. keywords for your business. Let’s look at some of them - 1. Know who you serve If you are doing keyword research for a client or doing it for your own product, knowing who and what a website serves to its visitors is a crucial step in finding some relevant seed keywords. You can have a look at the title tags and H1 tags of any webpage to get a gist of the keywords to be chosen. For example, if you are a digital marketing agency, digital marketing or online marketing or marketing should be the keyword your homepage must be built around on... 2. See through your user’s eyes It’s important to get into your user’s shoes and think about their intent when searching for your services online. Say, a searcher wants to buy ‘shoes’. His searches would be something like this - ‘nike shoes’, ‘casual shoes’, ‘best formal shoes’ or something similar. So, if you sell shoes, it makes sense to add these search strings to your keyword list. 3. Use a tool You might need around 30-40 apt keywords for your research. And using a tool like Keyword Planner can come in handy when searching for keywords with high search volumes. But using Keyword Planner requires a Google Adwords account which can be a trouble if you don’t have one. Don’t worry though, there are other tools that deliver this functionality as well. And probably the most used keyword finder, after Keyword Planner, is Keyword Tool. This tool literally bombards you with all the relevant keywords there are in accordance with your query. Suppose, you want to write a blog post for currently the most trending keyword in the UK - GDPR. Let’s see what keywords the tool throws at us -
Getting down to the research
Copy and paste the keywords to Ahrefs or SEMrush to begin your quest of choosing the best keyword. Both of these tools are great. Both are quite similar in pricing as both the tools offer a basic subscription of $99 and provide almost the same level of functionality (limited in free accounts) but all the difference lies in how they present data to users and that can sometimes make all the difference. I personally like Ahrefs more because of the sheer simplicity of the platform when it comes to keyword research and they also present their data in a more intuitive way (which you’ll see through screenshots as you’ll further read this blog). Which is probably the reason why we use it for our SEO purposes as well. But the only downside of using Ahrefs is that they don’t provide a free account. In the remaining part of this blog, I will be telling you how to research keywords both on Ahrefs and SEMrush so it completely depends on you which tool you want to use and spend your precious marketing budget on. But before we begin, it’s important to know about some of the metrics that we will be basing our keyword research on to find the most profitable keywords, which are -- Keyword difficulty - Ranked from 0 to 100, it is an estimate of how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 of search results.
- Volume - Denotes how often a target keyword is searched by users per month in a given country
- SERP Features - This metric shows us the different SERP features present on the search results such as Ads, top stories, related questions, AMP carousels etc.
- Clicks - This metric reflects the total number of clicks in a month on a particular keyword
- Cost per click - It is an estimated cost-per-click value of a keyword.
- Clicks per search - Shows how many search results people click on for a particular keyword.
- Return Rate - Tells us how often search for a targeted keyword again.
Researching Keywords on Ahrefs
Go to the ‘Keywords Explorer’ tab and paste your sheet containing all the remaining keywords on the search tab. You’ll be limited to a hundred keywords here. So, make sure you paste the best of the bunch.




Researching Keywords on SEMrush (free account)
Ahrefs and SEMrush are on the same level when it comes to functionality but to unleash the full potential of SEMrush you’ll have to spend some bucks on its subscription (just like Ahrefs). But the good part is that SEMrush lets you play with their tool ‘a little’ to get a gist of how it functions. If you are unsure whether to spend your marketing budget on the platform or not, I seriously recommend you to test their platform before making the final decision. You’ll be limited to 10 searches per day in your free account which I think is just enough to get a feel for the software. Note: Both the platforms are different in how they search for keywords. While Ahrefs can search for multiple keywords (100 max) in one go, SEMrush can search for a single seed keyword at a time and kills the need to use the keyword tool we mentioned earlier. Just go to their website and search for a seed keyword you want to rank for. In our case, we will go with the term we chose for Ahrefs - GDPR.



Researching Keywords on SEMrush (paid account)
With a paid account, you’ll be able to see all the results there are in the searches we did above on the free account. Other than that, you’ll get access to it’s ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ (beta).... sounds interesting, doesn’t it? But what exactly is it?





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