Keyword research strategy

Academy Study Groups Study Group: Content Marketing
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Hey all :waving_hand:, new member here, but long time HubSpot power user!

I’d love to hear everyone’s keyword research strategy as it’s something we tend to struggle with, but understand how important it is to set your content up for long term SEO success.

Here’s my (very basic) keyword research strategy:

  • Use ahrefs or SEMRush
  • Put in a few high level keywords I’m interested in targeting
  • View similar keywords in the results
  • Filter by monthly volume greater than 500/mo (sometimes I push this down a little bit towards 350+)
  • Filter by keyword difficulty of less than 15

The idea here is that 500 search volume is enough to make an impact, and keyword difficulty of less than 15 is a relatively easy opportunity to rank high and quickly (so long as you produce high quality, valuable and relevant content).

Then, if there are keywords that match that criteria use them. This is where content creation SEO strategies then come in such as using that keyword in your title, slug and H1.

But for this post - I’m mostly curious how you all are doing the upfront keyword research.

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Hi @natejoens, this a great question (and hope more people chime in on their process!).

I would say your process is very similar to mine! I used to do more keyword research in my previous role working with a marketing agency, but I used Ahrefs for my research as well. I would also enter high-level keywords then filter through similar keywords that had a certain search volume and keyword difficulty.

There’s also a tool in Ahrefs that pulls the top ranking sites for a keyword, and I remember using that feature a lot. Since those sites/blogs were ranking high, I assumed they were doing something right. I would identify common keywords or topics that were mentioned throughout those sites, and consider them for my own content.

Ahrefs has a ton of great features and tools like this, and I highly recommend watching their YouTube videos to learn how to make the most of their different tools!