90 Digital CEO Nick Garner gives us an overview of what Ubersuggest and SEMrush can do for you in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.
Ubersuggest
If I’m interested in a niche phrases i.e. a big set of variations of a brand phrase and keyword ‘reviews’, then I use ubersuggest.com. I find it gives far, far more detail than Google Adwords Planner.
Because it works of Google keyword suggest it gives really detailed lists of keywords.
Tip.. ubersuggest isn’t ‘clever’ like Google keyword tool, so when you input your keywords make sure you have worked out your variations i.e. [name of operator] ‘reviews’ | ‘reviews’ [name of operator] because Ubersuggest typically lists the results in the order you entered them.
For this article I did a simple test. I used keyword ‘betfair reviews’ and ran it on Adwords planner and on ubersuggest. Below is the comparison table:
The upshot is that ubersuggest is amazing for long tail keyword research…and it’s free!
SEMrush & Searchmetrics keyword research
I use both tools, but I generally have a bias toward SEMrush for keyword research. They run a giant database of search data that can show you what keywords a given site ranks for. It won’t give you data on long tail phrases, but short and mid tail phrases are pretty good.
When I am stuck on what keywords to research for I will do a search for a phrase on Google and seek out the big rankings sites. From that I’ll use a tool we have created in Excel to ping SEMrush’s database and return a list of keywords and pages the site ranks for.
From that I can make a lot of sense of what sort of phrases I should focus on. A good example might be something like ‘free bets’.
I would go into Google and run the query. From that I’ll get a number of domains to reference. I’ll take the top 5 domains and run SEMrush on these to get a list of the phrases these sites rank for.
From that I can see which sites are targeting what words and then i can get ideas on what keywords are possibly worth targeting.
My main assumption is that sites in competitive segments will know exactly what they are targeting and whatever comes up is a good indicator of where the money is.
It also shows who they structure their site and it gives you a good indication of what sort of onsite optimisation is needed to rank on a particular keyword.
Generally I use SEMrush as a way of bridging the gap between just looking at a bunch of keywords and actually analysing a site, understanding competitiveness and corresponding site architecture.
