SEMrush Topic Research Tool
SEMrush Topic Research Tool
Hello everyone. This is just a brief overview of the recent webinar I did with AJ Ghergich. This was on the topic of the research tool SEMRush. I'm just going to tell you what the tool does and how to navigate the website. So, first of all, as always with the SEMRush tools, where do you find the tool? On the left you can see it just below the gap analysis. Make sure to click on topic research, and it will give you a nice overview of the tool.
So, what does the topic research tool do? Now it is basically giving you substantive ideas. And it basically crawls, looks at other websites from the locations, or the kind of search term you're looking for, and gives you ideas about that. Quite a cool easy to use tool. What you can do is enter a domain name or a subject in the search bar. Now I'm just going to use a search term, so we're doing used cars, just like I did on the live webinar. Make sure you click on the correct database. You can go straight to Scotland and city level so we'll just do Aberdeen. And click the big green button, get ideas for content.
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Now it will take a few seconds for the tool to work, but it is normally quite fast. So we have the dashboard here. Now, as you can see, collecting other topic cards still works. So we'll just give it a second to finish. Before we do anything, I'll walk you through the usual stuff here. So you can export these topics to XLS by clicking the green button here. And I'll talk you through all things here.
So the content ideas tab is the first tab. We talk about that. So we're going to go to maps first and foremost, so what it does is it fetches all the data as maps. So it has Land Rover, UK, it has cars for sale Aberdeen, Gumtree. And various other things. What I'm going to do is click on these here.
Now it gives you a kind of volume. It gives you some other data there. But when we click on it, everything will be displayed. So it has the volume, sub topic volume 320, difficulty is 88.63%. The efficiency of the subject is average.
Basically what it does is give us some content ideas, some main ideas that we can see here. So it has used cars for sale in Aberdeen, which makes reasonable sense. Used cars for sale in Dice, which is in Aberdeen, and various other headlines we could use there. Below are some related searches.
And then it goes back to the subject maps again. So it is very simple and easy to use. Depending on the topic cards you click on, it depends on the search term you get or will depend on the data you get.
Aberdeen is not a large city and it will not always yield a huge amount of data. But we'll click on other things. So you have ... if you are looking for something more competitive like the UK. It will have used cars for sale in the UK, used cars for sale, and some general headlines here. It also has questions. So it has a whole bunch of questions that you can filter by what, how, why, what, where, and which. And you can click on everything.
So it has 49 questions that you can blog about too. The subject volume here is 2900. Difficulty 90.42%. So those are some topic ideas out there. Now when you go through these topic ideas, you can click on different cards, and you might find a great question here and go to another card and find another question. So, how do you collect all this data? If you click on this little icon here you can add that to favorites and it will turn green. And you can scroll down further and add several others as favorites, and we'll go to the headings and we'll add a few favorites there too.
Now I could go to Landrover and it will fetch a ton of Landrover related headlines and questions, and we'll add some as favorites too. Just stay in the headlines. And again, as always, it has the related searches below.
So what we can do is if we look at the second tab, all of your stuff is stored here for you which you can then export using the big green button. So you can go through all the different cards and just click and favorite any good headlines or questions you want to use. And then continue from there. So we go back to content ideas.
That's what cards are, that tab there gives you cards. It also has another tab called explorer. Now the explorer basically gives you the kind of subtopic here on the left.
The content idea there, and it also gives you a sense of Facebook engagements, backlinks, total shares and things like that. In terms of topic ideas, it's always good to gauge the type of engagement something has gotten on Facebook. If something has gotten good engagement on Facebook, it's probably something you might want to think about.
Now, I don't say that for everything, but in general, things that get shared or more engagement on Facebook are probably nicer ideas for content. So keep that in mind when looking at the explorer tab there. You can scroll through those and favorite them, and all that kind of stuff too.
Now the overview is just giving you a general overview of the kind of top 10 headlines based on backlinks. And the 10 interesting questions.
And then here we have a mind map that gives you a nice little map for you to check out. And it is not full… it again depends on the search term. If I were to make used cars all over the UK there would be a lot more here. But since we filtered it to Aberdeen, it will give me a much more condensed amount of data.
That's pretty much the subject research tool. It's great to get content ideas. And we all struggle, we always know the king of that content and we want new ideas. So it's great to just enter a URL or a keyword and see what other people are doing. Headlines, questions, do them all. And always, always, always for me, I always go out on search volume. So if something has a decent search volume, then I want to be involved. And that's something I would like to think would be the same across the board. The more searches, the more traffic you are likely to get.
That topic research is the tool at the forefront of SEMRush anyway writer and you can export any data if you want, to send it to a contentor whatever it may be. It's a great little tool, it gathers all the data for you and makes life a lot easier. So good luck using it, and if you have any issues or if you want to provide feedback to SEMRush, hit the Send Feedback button and the guys will take your opinion if it's a good idea. And if you run into any trouble using the tool, they have a support team there too. Good luck with that.
Topical SEO is what drives the growth of a website's topical authority. Keywords are still alive, but topics are what search engines use to index and rank web pages, for the most part, these days. To improve your depth content, your focus topics must be chosen carefully and written about. This is where topic research tools come in handy.
These days keyword research tools are very readily available and with some tweaks, most of them can be used for topic research as well. Still, they may be a bit too literal and deliberately too close to the original seed sentence. Topics are broader concepts with a keyword universe directly below. Remember, topics are abstract topics expressed using keywords - that's why topics and keywords work together, not against each other!
The best topic research tools should be easy to use with a few clicks. Generally, you type your core topic and expect key phrases, questions, and other related topics in return. Some keyword research tools are real-time and fast, while others take a little more time but provide more accurate results.
1. Keyword Planner
Google is by far the best search engine ever, but it is also an advertising engine. The giant has collected so many insights from searches and the trillions of indexed web pages that they have their own topic research tool. Using the Keyword Planner has been really easy since their recent 2018 update.
Type one or a group of topic ideas in the search box and instantly get a list of related sub-topics and key phrases to write about (or advertise against). And this tool is virtually free - just top up your Google Ads account, even for a dollar!
The only downside to this tool is that the suggestions are often very close variants of the seed topic. So it remains very narrow. See the screenshot below, I have imported caffeine and most of the suggestions contain the word caffeine . While this was to be expected, we don't want to fill our content with a single keyword. There are some more welcome variations, such as coffee or inflections such as caffeine. Remember that using a wide variety of terms will help increase your topic coverage.
Topic research example in the Google Ads Keyword Plan tool.
2. WikiBrowser
Our free current research tool! WikiBrowser allows you to visualize Wikipedia pages in a really refreshing way. We are removing all textual content to focus on related Wikipedia pages. A particular topic is indeed defined by the keywords used to express it, but even more so by the topics of which it is a neighbor.
As an aside, topic neighbors are how modern algorithms like classifications find topics. They put all concepts in a three-dimensional matrix (vector space) and see which ones are close to each other. German Shepherd and Dog would clearly be closer than dog and computer.
This tool makes perfect sense. Type the page name, hit enter and visualize what really matters when you do your topic research:
the thesaurus-like outline of
topic a list of ranked
keywords associated with the topic
Overview of our popular WikiBrowser, one of the best free topic research tools available. there are!
For example, if you want to be authoritative on the topic of German Shepherds, you should also talk about the shepherd group it belongs to, search and rescue duties and training, as well as police dogs and many other related topics.
3. Questions.NINJA
Questions.NINJA is a free keyword research tool with an inexpensive, generous pro plan that scours the web looking for questions related to a particular seed keyword. It's a great way to come up with dozens of current relevant questions and select a few to add to existing or future blog posts. Plus, such questions are great new content ideas as some can be so broad that they can become new pieces of content on their own.
People tend to use real questions to find answers, as opposed to simple keywords. For example, a person might use questions such as "What are the differences between Arabian and Robusta coffee beans?" Google tends to show featured snippets with a short answer to the question asked by the user.
When you write a blog post or aboxes short table of contents, you want to find the most relevant questions to include in the article in these answers above the fold. They're a huge driver of traffic (they appear above the first result) and shouldn't be ignored.
4. Answer The Public
When you know the key phrases to cover, Answer The Public gives you search engine autosuggest data in a stunningly visual way. So once you submit your topic, it will automatically call up the Google servers (this will take a few seconds) and then display common questions and other searches related to your basic topic. Some topics really don't yield results, such as delivering topical authority (how sad, ha!), But others will get you hundreds of hits.
Check it out, it's a cool way to find some FAQs to answer in the body of your blog post, or even pick some questions and answer each with a full article. There is no search volume data on Answer The Public, but you can export the data as a spreadsheet and then copy and paste it into the Google Ads keyword planner to get the historical search volume for each suggestion.
The data is sorted by question label (what, how, which, who, when, where, etc.), but there are also suggestions based on prepositions. This is a generally helpful resource for common topics. You can complete the information yourself by typing your phrase on Google and checking the recommended searches, the "People ask too" box, and so on. All of the contextual data from your search will help you understand what people want to know so that you can better cover it in your blog post.
Current SEO requires many questions to be answered. Answer The Public is a great way to find such questions on a specific topic!
5. sense2vec
Topical SEO is so new because the algorithms required to detect topics in textual content have only recently been perfected. In the past, such algorithms were somewhat imprecise and extremely hungry in terms of computing power. Sense2vec is one of those algorithms, and a tool has been provided by the machine learning company explosion.ai.
Sense2vec is both a natural language processing method to discover topics, but also a resource for topic research if you want to use their demo. It's completely free and while it's not designed or built for SEO purposes, it does the job!
In their own words, the sense2vec demo "read every comment posted on Reddit in 2015 and built a semantic map." What exactly does that mean? Well, without going into too many details, the algorithm read all the Reddit comments and extracted the most important keywords (noun phrases mainly). But each time, the algorithm looked at the nearest neighbors and took such a factor into account when building the knowledge graph.
So when you type in a topic name or keyword, the application will find the corresponding entity in the model and return all the coexisting neighbors found in these millions of Reddit comments. Since it is based on a huge amount of data, noise and irrelevant neighbors simply disappear. You might get a strange result here and there, but overall it's great!
6. Topic seed
Best for the end - topic seed is our own topical SEO platform! It is a suite of Herculean tools that help content strategists increase their topical authority, find new article ideas,and reach content depth. We also have powerful visualization tools that allow you to compare a single or multiple web pages against your competitors.
During the research phase of your topic, you want to analyze what your competition is writing about for the same topic:
how many pages cover a particular topic,
which key phrases and words these pages use the most
, do they use simple or complex variations for their keywords,
what outbound links have they added, etc.
The topicseed platform does exactly that. View our phrase chart below. We analyze a blog post from a hypothetical competitor and at a glance we can see which phrases they use the most. If they score very high, you de facto know what Google wants to read! Every topic on Earth has its own ever-expanding keyword universe. This means that you should use as many of these keywords as possible to show the search engine that you know what you are writing about.
Our own phrase table that shows you what a document is talking about.
An actual phrase table can contain hundreds of keywords, so we'll allow filtering by terms (just type it and it will automatically filter out), phrase score, or even word count. Unigrams (one-word keywords) are rarely useful and salient. We recommend content marketers to focus on bigrams or longer nouns. However, it is important to focus on a particular term to view the list of keyword variants for SEO purposes.
View the analysis of the same document with a filter added over a particular term we want to focus on:
Use a filter term or keyword to view a lot of variations found in the given document.
Here, after adding filters, you can see the long list of keyword variations that this document contained. Sure, the document is clearly about dog clippers, but what does this assumption translate to? Well, they use many variants to show Google their current width and depth. In addition, this makes it more interesting for the reader as we avoid unwanted keyword stuffing.
To wrap up this article, I'd like to recommend any content marketer to follow a healthy topical SEO strategy. What I mean by that is simple. Take a step back from your article-oriented approach. Do a lot of research independently of a single blog post. Find focus topics you want authority on, create pillar pages, create long evergreen articles, shorter articles, and so on.
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