SEMrush Topic Research Tool
Hi guys. This is just a brief overview of the recent webinar I have done with A.J. Ghergich. This was on the topic research tool from SEMRush. I’m just going to talk you through what the tool does and how you navigate about the website. So, first thing’s first, as always with the SEMRush tools where do you find the tool? On the left hand side, you’ll see it just below the gap analysis. Just make sure you 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 basically gives you content ideas. And it basically crawls, it looks at other websites from the locations, or the kind of search term that you’re looking for, and gives you ideas around that. Quite a cool, easy to use tool. What you can do is either enter a domain name or a topic in the search bar. Now I’m going to just use a search term, so we’ll do used cars, the same as I’d done on the live webinar. Make sure you click the correct database. You can go right down to Scotland, and city level, so we’ll just do Aberdeen. And click on the big green button, get content ideas.
Now, it does take a second or two for the tool to work, but it is normally fairly fast. So, we have got the dashboard here. Now, it’s still working, as you can see, collecting other topic cards. So, we’ll just give it second to finish. Before we do anything, I will talk you through the usual stuff here. So, you can export these topics to XLS by clicking on the green button here. And I’ll talk you through all the stuff here.
So, the content ideas tab is the first tab. We’ll talk about that. So, we’ll go to cards first and foremost, so what it does is it pulls all the data as cards. So, it’s got Landrover, the UK, it’s got cars for sale Aberdeen, Gumtree. And various other stuff. What I’m going to do is click on this one here.
Now, it gives you the kind of volume. It gives you some various other data there. But if we click on it, it will bring everything up. So, it’s got the volume, subtopic volume 320, difficulty is 88.63%. Topic efficiency is medium.
Now, what it basically does is gives us some content ideas, some headline ideas which we can see here. So, it’s got used cars for sale in Aberdeen, which is fairly common sense. Used cars for sale in Dice, which is in Aberdeen, and various other headlines that we could use there. Down below it does give you some related searches.
And then it goes back to the topic cards again. So, it’s very simple and easy to use. Depending on what topic cards you click, will depend on the search term that you’re going to get or is going to depend on the data you get.
Now, Aberdeen’s not a big city, and it’s not always going to provide a huge amount of data. But, we will click on some other stuff. So, you’ve got … when you’re looking the something that’s more competitive, like the UK. It’s going to have used cars for sales UK, used cars for sale and some generic headlines here. It’s also got questions. So it’s got a whole bunch of questions that you can filter down into what, how, why, what’s, where, which. And you can click on all.
So, it’s got 49 questions that you can blog about as well. The topic volume here is 2,900. Difficulty 90.42%. So, that’s some topic ideas there. Now, when you’re going through these topic ideas you might click on various different cards, and you might find a great question here and then go to another card and find another question. So, how do you collate all this data? If you click on this little icon just here, you can add that to favourites and it turns green. And you can continue to scroll down and add several other as a favourite, and we’ll go over to the headlines and we’ll also add a couple of favourites in there.
Now, I could then go to Landrover and it’s going to pull a whole bunch of Landrover related headlines and questions, and we’ll add some of these as favourites as well. Just stick in headlines as well. And again, as always, it’s got the related searches down below.
So, what we can do is if we look at the second tab, it’s got all of your stuff here stored for you that you can then export by using the big green button. So, you can go through all different cards and just click and favourite all the good headlines, or questions that you want to use. And then carry on from there. So, we’ll go back to content ideas.
That’s what cards is, that tab there gives you cards. It’s also got another tab called explorer. Now, the explorer will basically give you the kind of subtopic here on the left hand side.
The content idea there, and it will also give you an idea of Facebook engagements, backlinks, total shares, and stuff like that. Now, in terms of topic ideas, it’s always good to kind of gauge the kind of engagement that something got on Facebook. If something got good engagement on Facebook, it’s probably something that you might want to think about.
Now, I’m not saying that for everything, but in general, things that are shared or get more engagement on Facebook are likely to be more fun ideas for content. So, just bear that in mind when you’re looking at the explorer tab there. You can scroll through that and favourite them, and all that kind of stuff as well.
Now, the overview is just going to give you a general overview of the kind of top 10 headlines based on backlinks. And the 10 interesting questions.
And then we’ve got mind map here which gives you a nice little map that you can have a look at. And it’s not full … it depends on the search term again. If I was to do used cars all over the UK, then there would be a lot more in here. But because we filtered it down to Aberdeen, then it’s going to give me a much more condensed bunch of data.
That pretty much is the topic research tool. It’s amazing for getting content ideas. And we all struggle, we always know that content’s king and we want new ideas. So, it’s great just to stick in 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 by the search volume. So, if something’s got a decent search volume, then I want to be involved with it. And that’s something that I would want to think would be the same across the board. The more searches, the more traffic you’re likely to get.
That is the topic research tool anyway on SEMRush and you can export all the data if you want to, to send it to a content writer or whatever it may be. It is a great little tool, it pulls all the data together for you, and makes life a hell of a lot easier. So, good luck when using that, and if you do have any problems or you want to give any feedback to SEMRush, go to the send feedback button and the guys will take on board your opinion if it’s a good idea. And if you’ve got any problems using the tool, they do have a support team there as well. Good luck with it.
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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