Keysearch is one of the tools I use daily to get great SEO results for my clients. Now I'm going to show you how to use Keysearch to do the same for your own website.
I recently wrote about how much website traffic you need to start getting more bookings, enquiries and sales from your website.
One of the key takeaways was this: If you want your website to consistently pull in leads, bookings and sales, you need to be getting a decent flow of organic search traffic.
This means that SEO matters, and one of the easiest ways to improve your SEO is by targeting the right keyphrases.
I’ve written before about how to choose keywords for your blog posts. It was a good guide, but it focused on doing keyword research for free, which involves a lot of guesswork, and can lead to frustration when you run up against the limitations of free tools.
If you’re willing to pay a (relatively) small amount, you can use Keysearch, which saves a tonne of time and guesswork. I absolutely love this tool and I’ve had fantastic results with it, both for myself and for my clients.
What’s so great about Keysearch?
The reason I love Keysearch is that it completely takes away the guesswork that comes with trying to figure out which keyphrases to target in your blog posts and main website pages.
✅ It tells you what people are searching for
✅ It tells you how many people (per month) are searching for a specific phrase
✅ It tells you how easy or hard it is to rank well for your chosen phrase
Keysearch focuses predominantly on keyword research, rather than being a full on SEO analysis software like Semrush or AHREFs.
This makes it way easier to use, a lot less overwhelming (if you just want to do keyword research), and let’s be honest, it’s at least 5 times more affordable than these bigger platforms!
If you’re an SEO specialist, or you hire an SEO specialist, then you’ll probably have to get familiar with the complexities of Semrush or Ahrefs.
For the rest of us, there’s Keysearch.
Here’s the trouble with trying to do keyword research for free:
Effective keyword research relies on two main factors:
1. Search volume
The number of people who are actually searching for the keyphrase you’re targeting. The more people who are typing this phrase into Google, the more clicks you’ll get if you rank well for that keyphrase. (And if absolutely nobody is searching for it, you may well be wasting your efforts).
2. Competition score
How many other websites are ranking for this keyphrase, and do you stand a chance of getting ahead of them? If competition is high, you’re probably going to be relegated to page 2, 3 or beyond (ie, nobody’s gonna see your web page/blog post).
I call keyphrases that have a high search volume and a low competition score ‘Golden Keyphrases’. They’re the magic words you need to identify if you really want to start getting visible in the search engine results pages.
But unfortunately, a combination of free tools and guesswork is only going to get you so far.
You might be able to get a good idea of search volume or competition score, but it’s next to impossible to figure out both, and to identify those Golden Keyphrases.
How to use Keysearch
Let me show you what happens when you type a search term into Keysearch:
- Your chosen keyphrase
- Related phrases people are searching for
- Search volume
- Competition score
- Filter to show results from your target audience country
- The top 10 organic search results for your chosen keyphrase
How easy is that? Keysearch gives you not only the search volume and competition score of your chosen keyphrase, but a bunch of other related phrases that real people are searching for.
Top Tip:
These related searches are also super valuable for market research. In this analysis of the phrase ‘financial advisor london’, we can see that a lot of people are searching for information about financial advisor jobs and salaries, rather than looking for financial advisor services. It may be an indication that the market is crowded, and supply is higher than demand.
How to find golden keyphrases - a case study
It can often take some trial and error to find keyphrases that work for your website and have that all important high search volume and low competition score. Let me show you what I mean.
Imagine you run an architecture firm, and you’re trying to optimise your main website pages for keyphrases you assume your potential clients are searching for.
Something like ‘architecture firm’ would be the obvious choice, right? Let’s run that through Keysearch and take a look at the scores:
The search volume is pretty good - 590 searches per month in the UK for ‘architecture firm’. Imagine if you got 590 hits to your website every month, purely from people who are looking to work with an architecture firm just like yours!
But the competition score is high. Unless your website already has a lot of high-ranking content and you’re a very well known company, you’re unlikely to show up on the first page for this keyphrase for a phrase like ‘architecture firm’.
Something more specific might work better.
Maybe you’re proud of your RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) accreditation, and you assume your potential clients will be searching for a RIBA chartered architecture practice. Let’s take a look at that as a keyphrase:
Here you can see that the competition score is nice and low - anything less than 20 should be pretty easy to rank highly for.
But unfortunately, a lot fewer people are searching for this than expected. Keysearch shows the search volume as 0, which actually just means fewer than 10. But optimising a main page on your website for this keyphrase is risky, if nobody is actually searching for it.
Here’s where it can be a really good idea to think about your niche and your specialisations.
Maybe your architecture firm specialises in home renovations. And in fact, anyone searching for an architect for home renovations would be your ideal client, so let’s have a look at this as a keyphrase:
And here we have it.
Yes, the search volume isn’t as high as something generic like ‘architecture firm’, but the competition score is easy enough that with some careful optimisation, you’d be able to appear on page 1 of Google.
With that kind of visibility, and 210 of your ideal clients finding your website every month, the enquiries and bookings should start flowing in.
Here’s a key point though:
Good SEO is only one side of the equation. The enquiries and bookings will only start flooding in if your website also portrays you as a professional, credible business, and creates a smooth and intuitive user journey for visitors. Every two weeks I send an email to a group of smart website owners, breaking down strategies to do just this. You can sign up here if you'd like to start receiving these emails.
Is Keysearch worth paying for?
If you're serious about showing up in search results, Keysearch is absolutely worth the investment.
Using Keysearch eliminates the guesswork when trying to do effective keyword research. Finding Golden Keyphrases is the main thing I use Keysearch for, both for my clients and for my own website. It actually has a bunch more useful features. You can track keywords you’re currently targeting to see how well you’re ranking, you can do a basic SEO audit of your site to figure out what needs fixing, you can create lists of potential keyphrases to compare them, and more.
But even if you only use it to identify these golden keyphrases, it’s well worth paying for, in my opinion.
If you decide to buy a subscription to Keysearch and you use one of the links in this article, I’ll get a small commission. I don’t typically use affiliate links, but I’ve made an exception here because this is a tool I genuinely use and recommend. It’s had a real impact for both my clients and my own business, and I only ever share products I believe will be genuinely helpful.
What to do next
Once you've found a Golden Keyphrase, either for a blog post or for a main service page on your website, the trick is to use it in your text for that page naturally.
Placing your keyphrase strategically in a few high-impact spots helps search engines understand what your page is about. But please avoid 'keyword stuffing' - you should be thinking about readers first and foremost.
Use your Golden Keyphrase in:
- your page or post title
- the first paragraph (if appropriate)
- your meta description for the page
- an HTML heading or subheading
- and a couple more times throughout the body of the text
(If you use WordPress, I've created a guide on how to use Yoast to optimise your blog posts for your chosen keyphrases.)
Then, you can use the Rank Tracker function on Keysearch to see where you're ranking for that particular keyphrase, and don't forget to keep an eye on your Google Search Console too. Here's my guide to using Google Search Console to find out what people are searching for to find you.
Remember, it can take a while for pages to be indexed and start ranking in search engine results, especially if your website is new and/or doesn't have a lot of content yet.
But once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to go wrong with a tool like Keysearch and some strategic optimisation. Good luck!