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Quickly Find the Best SEO Keywords to Leverage for Your Site
Quickly Find the Best SEO Keywords to Leverage for Your Site

This video will show you how to use SpyFu to find strong SEO keywords, your competitors may have overlooked.

Patrick McGrane avatar
Written by Patrick McGrane
Updated over a week ago


Do you want to find good SEO keywords in your industry?  Ones that are searched for a lot, but that have gone relatively unnoticed by your competitors? You've come to the right place.

In this video you’ll learn how to use SpyFu to find top performing SEO keywords in your niche. We’ll cover how to sort and filter your top competitor’s keywords and find that low hanging fruit you can take advantage of.

At SpyFu we try and make finding strong keywords as quick and easy as possible.The entire process takes only minutes and will help you build a list of relevant, actionable keywords for your site. Leverage these up and coming keywords and climb the ranks faster.

Step 1: Enter in your competitor into the main search box in SpyFu - https://www.spyfu.com/

Step 2: Go to the SEO Keyword Research section - https://www.spyfu.com/seo/keywords

Step 3: Sort the results by the "Searches/Mo" column. Look for keywords that have a reasonably high searches per month, and also relatively low ranking difficulty. These are popular keywords that your competitors haven't discovered yet.

Step 4:Identify which of these keywords fit your site, and that you are comfortable creating content around.

That's it!


Video Script:

Hi this is Patrick with SpyFu.com, today we’re going to learn a simple way to find strong SEO Keywords in your niche using SpyFu.

*Intro*

At its core, SpyFu is a competitive intelligence tool. Meaning you’ll get the best insights if you spy on a larger successful competitor in your industry.

In this search box I’m going to type Behr.com, and hit enter. 

And we’re greeted by this overview page. It has a lot of information about this domain, but since we’re focusing on SEO today, let’s click over to the SEO Research tab.

This is the SEO overview of this domain, it will also give you a lot of good general information, but when working with SEO keywords I believe the best place you can go is… well… to the SEO Keywords tab!

What we’re getting on this page is every keyword that SpyFu has seen Behr ranking on organically as of last month. 

Here’s the keyword itself.

And what URL this keyword will guide you to.

You can even click this little GoTo icon to see the actual webpage itself. It might be their homepage, a landing page, maybe a product page or even something from their blog!

This number is current rank of this keyword for this domain, as of our last update. We also show you how it changed since our last update, either moving up or down in the ranks. 

For example, Behr is currently ranked 9th for paints, and they’re up 1 from the previous month. Meaning they had the 10th spot last month.

Following this are some columns with useful data including

Cost per click - which is what this keyword would’ve cost Behr if they decided to run ads on it.

The Ranking difficulty - which is a measurement of how hard it is to rank highly on this keyword. If companies like Amazon, or YouTube are vying for this keyword, it’s going to be more difficult for you to rank on. Behr is a big company, and the keyword “paints” is pretty competitive, so it has a fairly high ranking difficulty. We’ll come back to this in a minute.

Searches per month - which is how many times this keyword was searched overall.

The estimated clicks per month - which takes the total searches per month, and adjusts it depending on where Behr ranks on this keyword. 

And finally the Estimated Click Value per month - which has a slightly more complicated formula, but the basics are the estimated clicks per months multiplied by the cost per click. Basically providing you with how much money they potentially saved by ranking on this organically rather than advertising on it through Google Adwords.

Which is a really handy metric for SEOs who are trying to explain their value in terms of actual dollars.

The stats that are probably the most important to you today, are the searches per month and ranking difficulty.

So let’s click on the searches per month title, to sort it by highly searched keywords.

What you want to find are those keywords that are getting searched for a lot, but also have a relatively low ranking difficulty. 

Makes sense right?

These are the keywords that a lot of people are looking for right now, but also are not highly sought after by strong competitors. Here’s your opportunity to swoop in and get ranked on some of those keywords before your competition finds out about them.

Let’s go deeper into ranking difficulty. First let’s sort by that column just like before.

Technically, Ranking difficulty is on a scale of one to one hundred. But a better way to think of it is by industry. In this case 79 is the highest rank, so we can assume it’s one of the most difficult keywords in the industry.

“Paints”? - yup, that makes sense.

So we’ll use 79 as our ceiling, so let’s scroll down to find our floor.

It looks like 44 is our floor right now, but keep in mind that there are almost 11 thousand rows of keywords to sift through, and that might be best done by exporting all of this into a CSV, which you can do!

But for right now we generally recommend that you stay in the bottom half of this keyword list. In this case the keywords between 44 and 64, that have a reasonably high search volume. 

That is a super quick way to jumpstart your keyword research using search data.

But there’s one more thing to keep in mind, aside from these metrics, and that is: how relevant is this keyword to you? How confident do you feel about writing about this keyword, does it fit into your metatags?

You can load up dozens of keywords, but if they don’t apply to you, or if you’re stumped on how to approach them, you might just be wasting your time trying to leverage them for your site.

But in a nutshell, SEO keywords is a great way to find low hanging fruit that you can use for your site. 

One final note, there are a bunch of handy filters premade for you, you can use these for your competitor’s keywords. Or even enter your own domain, maybe to find keywords that are Almost There (meaning, almost on the first page) and try and focus on them.

In the next video we’ll talk about finding this domain’s high ranking organic content. 

As always, thank you for watching.

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