Where do I find the right keywords?

You’ve now learned about what keywords are, what keyword volume, and what keyword difficulty are, but you have the next valid question: Where do you find them?

I’ll recommend FREE platforms that will help you find the right keywords:

  1. Semrush free account
  2. Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator tool
  3. Ahrefs Free Keyword Difficulty tool

1. Semrush free account 

You can go for a 7-day trial where you can access everything that Semrush has to offer in that limited timeframe, but I’ll advise you to go for a Semrush free plan that you can keep for eternity, albeit with limited availability to certain functions. Nevertheless, for you, it’s perfect. 

You don’t have to pay and you will have the chance to check 10 keywords a day in Keyword Overview, and you can run another 10 keyword searches in the Keyword Magic Tool. (You’ll find both once you log in.)

These add up to 100 keyword searches a day, with numerous data points, including keyword volume, keyword difficulty, getting ideas for other relevant keywords, and my favorite: information on whether the keyword is informational or commercial.

What are informational and commercial keywords?

Semrush’s SEO tool will show you if a keyword is informational or commercial.

This means that you’ll know what the search intent is behind the keyword: the person who is looking for something using that term can be planning to buy something (commercial intent) or want to learn something (informational intent). 

Service and product pages should be optimized for commercial-intent keywords, while blog posts and other information-based, educational content pieces should be optimized for informational-intent keywords. 

Even though this information in Semrush is a very good pointer, I advise you to always check yourself manually what pages rank for the keyword by doing a Google search.

Sometimes, you see the label “informative” in the tool, for instance, but in reality, it’s a mix of informative- and commercial-intent pages. This means that you could go for the possibility of ranking for that keyword with commercial content, too, a webshop page, for example. 

To give you some easy examples, a typical informational-intent keyword can be “what is digital illustration” or “how to create webshop” – these both immediately call for educational content like a blog post that will give you the answer to those questions. 

“Website builder”, although Semrush labels it as both an informational- and commercial-intent keyword, is definitely a commercial keyword with several service provider pages listed for it in Google that offer you their tech to help you create a site.

In this case, you could only compete here with a commercial content page but only if you are one of the big ones — at the time of writing this, this keyword has a 167.7K monthly search volume globally and a very high keyword difficulty with 100%.
Screenshot of a keyword overview in Semrush — Image source: TC’D Semrush account

As you can see on the screenshot, besides receiving information on your chosen keyword, you’ll get many other keyword ideas that are related to the same subject.

With a keyword research tool, you can find secondary keywords that you can use along with your main keyword in your content.

Secondary keywords cover the same topic but with slightly different phrases or pointing to subtopics that you can use to your advantage. 

For example, if you want to write an intro-type of content about digital illustration and your main keyword is “digital illustration”, another variation of the phrase can be “digital art illustration”, and another related keyword is “what is digital illustration” in a question format.

The tool showing you the keyword “what is digital illustration” also tells you that people are interested in knowing that, so you should dedicate a section to it in your content, answering that question by describing the term.

Other times, the keyword ideas you’ll see in a keyword research tool will help you think of completely new content ideas.

With a little practice in picking out the right keywords and learning how to analyze the pages that are already competing for a given keyword in search (more on this later), you’ll figure out which keywords to include within the same content, and which ones to use in a separate one or even to create a series of blog posts.

2. Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator 

Ahrefs is the other big player in the market of SEO software tools. They have a well-known and well-respected keyword research tool that you can pay for, but for their free keyword generator, you don’t even have to create an account—you just open the page in your browser and get, for instance, 40 keyword suggestions (at the time of writing this) for the term and topic, “digital illustrator”.

What could be easier than opening a new tab in your browser and finding new keyword ideas this quickly? Of course, you’ll find the necessary volume and difficulty metrics there, too.

Screenshot of keyword ideas in the Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator tool — Image source: Screenshot taken by TC’D team

3. Ahrefs Free Keyword Difficulty

Another tool from Ahrefs, but this one focuses on keyword difficulty. As you can see from the screenshot, “digital illustrator” is a medium-difficulty keyword, and Ahrefs estimates that I’ll need to have backlinks from around 24 websites to rank in the top 10 in Google for this keyword.

I can also check which sites rank first for this keyword already, how many backlinks they have, and what is their domain rating. Domain rating is a special Ahrefs metric to show a site’s strength, while Semrush has something similar but even more extensive called the Authority score.

The higher these numbers are, the bigger the (SEO) player you found ranking and competing for the keyword that you’re checking.

What is domain rating and authority score?

Domain rating // Ahrefs: This is the metric that shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile compared to the others in Ahrefs’ database on a 100-point scale.

Authority score // Semrush: This is Semrush’s metric that measures a domain’s “reputation”. It accounts for the number and quality of its backlinks, organic search traffic, and overall authenticity of its profile.
Screenshot of keyword ideas in the Ahrefs Free Keyword Difficulty tool — Image source: Screenshot taken by TC’D team