SEMRush Tutorial: How to Use the Keyword Magic Tool for New Content Ideas

Are you new to using SEMRush? Thinking about using that Keyword Magic Tool, but not sure exactly how to use it? Then stick with me until the end of this article, because I’m going to show you how to use SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool to find longtails to create content for.

I’m going to go over what the tool is as well as a real-world example of how we might use the tool along with advanced filters that you can use yourself and then wrap up with five tips for how to master the Keyword Magic Tool.

By the end of this article, you should have a stronger grasp in terms of how to use this tool to start creating some content ideas that will help your business get more organic traffic.

I would assume that you know, what SEMRush is. And if you don’t, check out my article here in which I reviewed this tool, but it’s pretty much a full suite digital marketing tool that you can use to do some keyword research search, as well as competitive analysis.

If you read my prior article on easy keyword research ideas, you’re well aware that if you use it bunch of free methods, it’s totally serviceable. However, you’re going to have to do a lot of extra work because you have to use things like Google autocomplete in which you’re putting in your longtail phrase, followed by A, B, C, D E F, and so on, on the alphabet in order to find potential longtails.

And then, what we did in that article was we had to run all of those longtails we found through a search volume tool in order to try to figure out whether or not the longtails we were finding were actually good ones. SEMRush does all of this for us and more. It’ll give us everything from broad to exact, to related phrases, to the keyword that we are putting into it.

Laminate Flooring Example

Let’s say that we are selling laminate flooring and that we want to boost our site’s organic traffic. So what I’ve done is I’ve gone ahead and navigated to the left hand side of SEMRush and clicked the Keyword Magic Tool.

And from here, I’ve typed in laminate flooring. Immediately what you’re going to see from the Keyword Magic Tool is that it has found potentially over 70,000 keywords that are related to the term laminate flooring. Furthermore, it breaks things down based on different categories.

For example, you can do a broad search, a phrase match and exact search as well as a related search. So it’ll give you a definition for what each of these things mean, but essentially it gives you an overview and a selection option for any single search that you want to do related to laminate flooring.

Another cool thing about SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool is it actually provides a ton of filter options from word count to volume, keyword, difficulty percentage, cost per click, competitive density, SERP features as well as the number of results in SERP.

As I scroll through this, you can see that it actually does some bucketing on the left hand side for me, which is a super convenient way to expedite my grouping process. If you read my prior article on easy keyword research, you know how important it is to find related keywords and group them as much as possible into a single evergreen post.

So what SEMRush does here is that, it actually does the first step of the work for me by giving me a general grouping so that I can start thinking about what sort of content pieces I could put together. So this is super helpful on the left hand side, cause it gives me filter views. For example, if I only wanted to look at keywords related to installing laminate flooring, I could just click this and it would output the phrases that are related to that and laminate flooring.

The other thing that you’ll see is that you’ll see that the tables are all manipulatable in the SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool. I can sort things by the keyword difficulty percentage by the CPC, competitive score and so on.

Applying our favorite SEMRush filters

Alright, now let’s go ahead and apply some of these filters and see where the magic of the Keyword Magic Tool really comes in. As you noticed in my prior article, I like to start out with phrases between a hundred and a thousand monthly searches. The reason why is because we are first building up our authority in this space, and we don’t quite have the clout yet to get those higher ranking words. And so what I like to do is go for these low hanging fruits so that I can build up my authority. And then, then get those bigger phrases later on.

So I’m going to do a hundred to a thousand volume. I’m going to do keyword difficulty up to 80%. And then I’m also going to go ahead and look for things that are at least three words or longer in terms of word count. And from this, what you’re going to see is it’s going to filter through those 70,000 or so keywords and show me the ones that are potentially fitting of all three of this criteria.

From this list, you can see the SEMRush has actually filtered those 70,000 or so keywords down to just 638. So it’s done a ton of work for us. Let’s say that we want to create some content marketing pieces on installing laminate flooring. All we need to do here is click install laminate flooring on the left side here, and SEMRush is going to output the 45 keywords that fall into this space.

And as you can see, there’s some potentially great longtails here. For example, installing laminate wood flooring, average cost to install laminate flooring, labor cost to install laminate flooring, which is essentially the same thing as the prior one. And there’s also other ones like laminate flooring installation tips, and so on.

So these are all keywords that could potentially make for great content marketing pieces. The other thing that I want to note is all of these have a decent amount of volume. They’re getting anywhere from several hundred to up to a thousand monthly searches. So if we’re able to rank on page one in the top three positions for any of these sorts of things, we could significantly increase the organic traffic of the site.

Questions tab overview

As we go through this list of keywords, you’ll probably notice that some of these keywords are related to inquiry-based intent. And what I mean by that, is there are questions that people are typing into Google. And so one of the cool things about SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool is that aside from just being able to filter through all these keywords super quick, you can actually go up and then click the questions tab and from here, SEMRush is going to output only the search results that relate to questions specifically.

So here you can see that as I filter for just the questions and I apply my same three criteria on word count, volume, as well as keyword difficulty percentage, I’m able to see that there are questions like, how much is laminate flooring, how to remove laminate flooring, how to shine, laminate floors. All of these great keywords that have low competition scores, low key difficulty percentages, and a high amount of volume.

If I didn’t want to go so deeply into the competitive end of things, to start out, I can actually go even further down the list and I can look for things in the several hundred search results, for example, how long does laminate flooring last or how to stagger laminate flooring?

Or if I want to go even further down, I can look at things likew, what’s the difference between vinyl and laminate flooring. These are the sorts of things that, I mean, in terms of when I’m first building out my niche. I can think about the smaller, longtail keywords before I build myself up to the ones that get high hundreds, if not thousands of monthly searches.

Brainstorming Content Ideas

From this list, I’m starting to get a ton of different ideas for content pieces. I could potentially make just a single awesome post on everything you need to know about installing laminate flooring, or I could create a ton of individual posts that just tackle each of these longtail competitive words.

And so as I’m going through these, and I’m looking at these longtails, I’m trying to brainstorm in my head, what sort of content pieces would buyers potentially find interesting, and also be related to the buying process of laminate flooring so that I can potentially draw up the intrigue through my content marketing pieces and funnel them into converting as a lead.

If I only wanted to stay in the questions tab of the SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool, then I could literally just try to answer every single one of these questions, as long as they don’t overlap and create it into something like a weekly series where it might be something like, five questions that everybody asks about laminate flooring or five questions that everybody asks about installing laminate flooring. Later on, I could do another one on five questions that everybody asks about laminate flooring and the cost of laminate flooring or whatever, and so on.

So what you can see here is that the grouping that SEMRush does for you on that left hand panel here, just jump starts your creative process, as you start to think about which content marketing pieces to create.

There are three things that I want to highlight before I jump into the five tips when it comes to using the SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool.

The first one is I want to draw your attention to the related tab and what this is going to do is it’s going to take the keyword that you insert into the tool and show you some other related keywords that you may not have originally thought of.

This is kind of the equivalent in Google to the people also search section at the very bottom of each query. And so if I remove the filters that I have applied here, you can see some of the related phrases to laminate flooring. There’s things like how has laminate flooring sold? What is laminate wood flooring?

If I just sort by the volume, I can also see this a little bit more at a higher level. And I can see that there are questions like, what is vinyl flooring, what is Pergo flooring. So these are things aren’t necessarily under the umbrella of laminate flooring, but are related, because there are other types of materials that people use for flooring.

Another thing I want to draw your attention to is the grouping of the versus. So when you go back to the all view in the Keyword Magic Tool, you’ll sometimes I have a grouping with versus as one of the options. This is an absolute gold mine when it comes to content ideas. And the reason why is because it’s typically related to high buyer intent phrases that your buyers have for you.

So for example, in this space, we have things like laminate versus vinyl being asked, to laminate versus hardwood and so on. These are the sorts of phrases that people love to search for when they’re actually very close to making a buying decision.

The final thing I want to draw to your attention before I dig into some tips for you is, I want to make sure that you check out the SERP features in the SEMRush magic tool. The Keyword Magic Tool has this feature, which allows you to isolate for things like featured snippet, people also ask, top stories, image packs, and more. And this is really cool because of what it does is it helps you prioritize which keywords are more valuable than other keywords, because if you’re able to rank for those people also ask for featured snippets, you’re going to be able to grow your site’s traffic significantly faster than the queries that don’t necessarily have these two features.

How do you use Keyword Magic Tool

So just to recap, how do you use the SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool?

  1. First, log into SEMRrush. If you don’t have an account, click the link here to start your free trial.
  2. Second, go to the Keyword Magic Tool and insert the phrase that you are looking to conduct a search on.
  3. The third step is you’re going to look at the results and apply some filters. I like to use a hundred to a thousand in volume, three words or more, and then keyword difficulty up to 80%.
  4. Next, go through all the groupings and try to figure out some content ideas that you could potentially  take to create onto your blog. From there, you’re pretty much done with the Keyword Magic Tool and it’s onwards to content planning and content that strategy.

If you want to get extra credit, what you can also do is you can go to the related tab and dig even deeper into your niche and deal with all of your keyword research at one time. It’s pretty much as simple as that.

5 Advanced tips that you can use to familiarize Keyword Magic Tool

Tip 1: Watch for the trendline

The first tip that I have for you is to watch for the trendline. And what I mean by that is there’s that column in the Keyword Magic Tool where it’s telling you how that longtail performs over the course of a year. What you want to make sure is that all the keywords that you’re looking for are not falling on the same trajectory for the trend line.

If, for example, you have a downward sloping line, you want to make sure that you get some upward sloping lines in the other direction in terms of content pieces to plan. What you don’t want to create, for example, all of these seasonal pieces related to just the winter, and then you have nothing come the summer to get your business new leads.

Make sure that you’re looking at these trend lines consistently and carefully so that you don’t have seasonality introduced into your organic search traffic. It can be super great to have seasonal content. We actually saw that in the article where I went over, how to repurpose your blog content with that landscaping company. Check that out if you haven’t already. But you want to make sure that everything is balanced in terms of your overarching content marketing strategy.

Tip 2: Check out the CPCs and try to avoid the highest ones.

The second tip I have for you is to check out the CPCs and try to avoid the highest ones. CPC stands for cost per click, and it’s pretty much what anybody will pay in order to try to get onto page one for that particular phrase.

So things that have a higher CPC are words that generally are closer related to high buyers intent. It’s going to be something like laminate, flooring installation. And what that means is that there’s likely a lot of money to be if you were to rank on the first page for that phrase.

That being said, though, it’s a double edged sword. If there’s a high CPC, then it also means that there’s a lot of paid search people that are going to be paying and to get onto page one. And what that can often mean is that there’s too many ads and not as many organic results. So what I like to do is I like to look at the longtail SEO phrases that have a medium to high CPC, but not necessarily fall into the highest bounds.

The reason why is because you want to be zagging when everyone else is zigging. So if everybody is paying for these high CPC phrases, then you’d want to look for that sweet spot in the middle, where you can still potentially get interested buyers, but not be in as competitive of waters as the people that are paying the highest amount for that particular phrase.

Tip 3: Prioritize creating content for longtails that have lower results.

The third tip I have for you is to prioritize creating content for longtails that have lower results. What I mean by that is there’s that column and the Keyword Magic Tool where it’s going to tell you how many results this particular phrase has in the overall search engine. And so what this means when it’s a lower amount is that there are less accurate pages that relate to this longtail that you’re looking at.

So it means that it’s going to be way easier for you to rank on page one. Then the ones that have millions of results.

Tip 4: Always use at least three advanced filters!

My fourth tip for you is to make sure that you’re always using at least three advanced filters. What I mean by that is always using some sort of a variation of those things like search features, keyword difficulty percentage, volume, word count and so on.

The reason why is because the whole point of the Keyword Magic Tool is to save yourself time in your keyword research. For starters, I recommend using something like keyword difficulty upwards of 80%, word count of three or more. And then a volume of a hundred to a thousand. And then if you want for extra credit, you can look for just the ones that have certain features like people also ask as well as featured snippets.

Tip 5: Double check the zero volume keywords.

My final tip for you is to double check the zero volume keywords. This is one of probably my favorite tip and the reason why is because it’s often overlooked by all of the classically trained SEOs and it’s something in which it has a lot of actual traffic.

It just never gets picked up by tools like SEMRush. If you look for keywords in your results. And you see something that kind of peaks your interest and you think for yourself that it would be something that somebody in your space would be looking for but it says that it doesn’t have volume. It might actually have volume.

The easiest way to double check is to do a search along the lines of site: , reddit.com or quora.com. And then ask the particular question that it says it doesn’t have any volume for. And if other people have asked this on these social forums, I guarantee you that there is monthly traffic for these particular phrases.

So you can find a ton of diamonds in the rough, if you’re willing to test some of these out for yourself and just use your intuition. In fact, if you do so, and you start to get a ton of traffic, one of these zero volume keywords, tell me in the comments below. I’d love to hear about it.

Big takeaways

There are two big takeaways I want you to remember about today.

  1. The first one is that the Keyword Magic Tool is true strength comes from its ability to consolidate a ton of workflows into a singular workflow. It is the easiest way to do keyword research at scale. And so you want to make sure that you’re using every feature that it gives you.
  2. The second thing to remember is that mastering advantage filters is the key to number one. And what I mean by that is when you apply advanced filters, you’re going to significantly cut down on the amount of time that you need to spend to do your keyword research and find those gold mines that are going to build a ton of organic traffic.

In my next article, I’m going to go over what the best way to learn digital marketing is.

If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to use SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool.