I am a professional affiliate since 2017, and I find one of my most important task is keyword research. Here’s a short guide with my best tips for other affiliates.

Keyword Research Tools

To do keyword research, I mainly use SEMRush. This is a paid SEO tool that is really useful for serious affiliates. It gives an estimate of searches for a given keyword, in addition to giving each keyword a difficulty score.

There are also similar tools to SEMRush like Ahrefs and Ubersuggest. Ahrefs is paid and more expensive than SEMRush and Ubersuggest has a free tier. If you have any of those tools, you can follow along this guide as these tools are pretty similar.

A few other tools that are really helpful when doing keyword research are Google Trends and Search Console. Both are free. Google Trends is an official tool by Google that you can use to compare search volumes for up to 5 keywords worldwide or in a specific country.

Search Console is an important tool for once your website is up and running and starts getting impressions and traffic from Google. This tool will tell you what pages and what keywords your website is getting Google traffic from. It will also show your average rankings, so you can use it to find opportunities for keywords to optimize for to increase your rankings.

Why do Keyword Research?

I find myself using keyword research when prospecting for new affiliate website projects. When doing keyword research to find entirely new website project prospects, I look for not just one good keyword, but many keywords.

For instance, finding phrases with tons of variations, is my favorite way of prospecting for new website ideas. I can give away one example that gave me the idea for creating a lot of content for my latest website, Ranked List.

What I found was a keyword phrase system like this: “location + attractions + map” has low competition and pretty decent search volumes across the board. A couple of examples are “Dublin attractions map” and “Stockholm attractions map”.

I can make hundreds of content pieces, or indeed base an entire new website around this phrase system. It is at least a great starting point, and then venture into other relevant keywords as I get burnt out or discover more low-hanging opportunities in the future. If the website gains some traction over time, I can go after more difficult keywords at that point as well.

If you discover some keyword systems of your own, you can use them for ideas on what to write content about for a long time.

Sometimes you don’t need to find these systems and are satisfied with finding a couple of new ideas for a few new blog posts. One way to do that is to do exactly what I did to come up with the idea for this blog post. I entered the keyword “affiliate” into SEMRush and then added the word “keyword” as include.

This gave me a list of keyword ideas for affiliate marketing content related to keyword research.

One of the biggest SEO ranking factors is having the keywords people search for in the title of the web page, and keyword research helps you find what keywords to try and include to maximize search potential. Keep in mind that making the titles enticing to click on in the search results is important as well.