What are keywords? How to use keywords to do Google SEO?

8 min readAug 10, 2022

SEO Keywords: How to use Keywords for SEO on your website

Keywords are words and phrases that people enter into search engines that help them find what they’re looking for.

For example, if you wanted to buy a new jacket, you could type “men’s leather jacket” into Google. Even though the phrase consists of multiple words, it is still a keyword.

What are keywords? How to use keywords to do Google SEO?

Of course, no one but the SEO industry uses this term. Most people would call it a “Google search” or “query”. All you need to know is that keywords are the same thing as “Google search” or “query”.

In this guide, you will learn:

How to Use Keywords for Google SEO [2022 Guide]

Why are keywords important?

Keywords are very important. As long as others enter the corresponding keywords in the search engine, your website will be displayed on the search results page.

For example, if you search for “how to do SEO” on Google, we’ll appear at the top of the SERPs:

Search “how to do SEO” in the Google browser, Ahrefs will appear in first place on the first page of the SERP.

Because this keyword has about 1,700 monthly searches in the US, appearing at the top of Google search results brings us a lot of visitors. In fact, this keyword has brought us over 900 visits in the past month.

How to get your website to show up on Google for keywords

Your website appears at the top of Google search results for a related keyword, which may bring you a lot of traffic, but what can you do to make it happen?

There are two ways.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC refers to paying Google to have your own website appear on search results pages for specific keywords. For example, if you sell email marketing software, you can bid on that keyword so that when people search for email marketing software, your website can appear at the top of Google’s search results.

That’s what Campaign Monitor is doing.

Campaign Monitor is a company that provides email marketing services. When you search for “email marketing software”, you can see paid advertisements for Campaign Monitor.

This is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You can select keywords and bid on Google’s platform. Your ad will then appear on Google’s search results pages. Google charges you every time someone clicks on an ad and lands on your site.

You can differentiate between paid results and organic (non-paid) results because paid results are flagged as ads.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimizing your web pages to improve their ranking in Google’s organic search results. And Google’s job is to rank the best, most relevant results for every search query.

If Google thinks your page is the “best” result for that search query, your site will get a steady stream of “free” traffic.

For example, the Ahrefs blog gets about 383,000 monthly organic search traffic from Google.

Our number one keywords like “SEO audit”:

The overview of search results for the keyword “SEO audit” shows that the number one link is Ahrefs’ website.

Keywords “Keyword research tools”:

The overview of the search results for the keyword “Keyword research tools” shows that the number one link is Ahrefs’ website.

and “local SEO”:

The overview of the search results for the keyword “local SEO” shows that the number one link is Ahrefs’ website.

Because we sell SEO tools, all of these keywords drive leads and contribute to our bottom line.

How to find keywords

Most people have some idea of what keywords they want to rank for in Google. But it’s impossible to know everything people search for. That’s why it’s worth doing some research to find more keywords.

There are many ways to do this, but the easiest way is to use a keyword research tool. (Ahrefs and Semrush).

Most of these tools are used the same way. You enter some broad keywords related to your industry, which we call these seed keywords, and these tools will feed back some related keywords to you.

For example, let’s say you sell headphones online. Your seed keywords might be “headphones”, “earbuds”, “earphones” and “beats”.

We entered these seed keywords into Ahrefs’ keyword analysis and looked at one of the keyword reports.

We now see over 2 million related keywords, including monthly search volume, average cost-per-click (CPC) for paid ads, and a ton of other SEO metrics.

How to choose keywords

No one can rank for all keywords, and no one can bid on all keywords. Therefore, it is important to choose your competitive range wisely. Let’s take a look at a few keyword metrics and attributes to help you choose the best keywords.

popularity
Search intent
value
Keyword Difficulty
popularity

Keyword popularity varies. For example, “how to post on Instagram” has about 35,000 monthly searches. But “how to get backlinks” only got 1,200 searches.

Does this mean that ranking “how to post on Instagram” is better than “how to get backlinks”? uncertain. If you sell SEO software like we do, it doesn’t make sense to rank for the first keyword. It may bring in a lot of visitors, but no one will buy our product.

You need to find keywords that are relevant to your business and judge them accordingly.

For example, “SEO tips” has 2,200 monthly searches, while “image SEO” has 350 monthly searches.

Since these two keywords are meaningful for us to appear in Google search results, we should probably prioritize the first keyword. why? Because it has more search volume. We might get more traffic from ranking first for this keyword than for another keyword.

You can check the search volume for almost any keyword in Ahrefs’ keyword analysis. Just enter your keywords, choose a country, and you’ll see country-specific and global search volumes.

While search volume is a good predictor of traffic potential in general, it’s not perfect.

Just look at these two keywords:

Judging by their search volume, you would think that the top few pages in the search results for “SEO tips” would get the most organic traffic. However, if we look at the current top-ranking pages for each keyword in Ahrefs’ website analytics, we find the opposite is true.

Click through these two articles to learn more about why search volume is not necessarily a good way to predict traffic.

Search intent

Suppose you sell robot vacuums online. Looking at the search volume alone, using “robot vacuum” as a keyword to rank for product pages seems like a good choice.

After all, someone searching for a “robot vacuum” might be looking to buy one, and you’re selling a “robot vacuum.” So what’s the problem with doing this?

The problem is that most people searching for this keyword aren’t ready to make a purchase. They’re just looking for product reviews and analysis of the best models available.

How do we know? Check out Google’s search results.

Searching for “robot vacuum” in Google, we can see that the highlighted part is the copy contained in the top links: “Best robot vacuum”.

As you can see, almost all of the search results are rankings of the best robot vacuums carefully ranked by consumer review sites. This is important because Google’s job is to show users the most relevant search results. If these search results are rankings for the best robot vacuums, then we can assume that’s what searchers want to see.

In SEO terms, this is called search intent.

If you want to get the best Google rankings for your keywords, you need to create content that aligns with search intent. In other words, don’t choose the keywords that searchers use to find blog posts to rank for pages, and vice versa.

value

Many people are often obsessed with search volume and search intent without stopping to think about the value of keywords. This is wrong.

Let’s say you sell pizza ovens online. You might see a keyword like “pizza dough” with 43,000 monthly searches and think it’s easy to rank for that keyword.

But ask yourself, how many people searching for “pizza dough” might want to buy a pizza oven? The realistic answer is probably no. Most people are pretty much just looking for a quick recipe. It’s unlikely they’ll want to spend a few hundred dollars on a pizza oven anytime soon.

So how do you judge the value of a keyword?

If you use a keyword search tool, such as Ahrefs’ Keyword Analysis, to analyze keywords in bulk, you can get a very rough “value” judgment by looking at cost-per-click (CPC). This represents how much an advertiser is willing to pay, on average, for a click on a keyword.

Bulk search keywords in Ahrefs’ Keyword Analysis to visually compare the cost-per-click (CPC) of each keyword.

What this means here is that if advertisers are willing to pay a high price for clicks, then the traffic brought by the keyword must have a certain value.

However, things are not so simple. Just because a keyword is valuable to others doesn’t necessarily mean it is valuable to you.

Take “link building service” as an example:

This keyword has a high CPC, and it’s easy to see why. Because providing link building services can make a lot of money, companies that provide link building services are also willing to pay high fees for this traffic.

However, since we do not provide link-building services, this keyword is of little value to us.

Keyword Difficulty

For example, you found the perfect keyword. This keyword has high search volume and the search intent matches your page content and looks very valuable. This keyword should be chosen to rank for the page, right?

uncertain. It depends on how difficult it is to rank for that keyword.

For example, take a look at the “mortgage payment calculator”:

“mortgage payment calculator” has a Keyword Difficulty score of 84. Given that our rating is from 0 to 100, this is quite high. This means that many of the top-ranking pages have many links from other sites. Because backlinks are an important ranking factor, without a large number of high-quality backlinks, it will be difficult for your page to surpass other pages for a top-ranking position.

Having said that, ranking on Google is more than just getting backlinks. So while the Keyword Difficulty score can help you get an idea of how difficult it is to rank, there are other factors you should consider.

Take a look and see what else factors into our complete guide to assessing keyword difficulty.

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