By Ryan Robinson
One of the best ways I’ve uncovered to grow your traffic faster right now, is leveraging the power of AI keyword research to unlock hidden traffic opportunities, easier than ever before.
Here’s an example of my process for quickly doing AI keyword research using RightBlogger’s AI-Powered Keyword Research Tool (a tool I built that you can use for free):
I’m thinking you’re probably already familiar with keyword research (even if, like many content creators I know, you’ve had challenges really making it work from an ROI-perspective in your business).
Keyword research is the process of finding relevant keywords (topics) to create content around, and guarantees that you’ll be meeting the real terms people search for on sites like Google, so that you can bring more high quality traffic to your website.
A “keyword” is any word or phrase that someone types into a search engine (like Google). Smart keyword research is all about finding relevant keywords for your business that have a good amount of search traffic, and aren’t too competitive.
The research process can feel daunting and many marketers & business owners I know aren’t sure where to begin—or really get the most out of this research process. That’s where AI keyword research comes in.
Understanding AI Keyword Research
So what is AI keyword research (versus regular keyword research)?
AI keyword research is the use of any AI tool or set of tools that help you with the keyword research process. These tools can dramatically speed things up & spot opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.
Before AI, keyword research meant (painful) manual hunting for possible keywords, trying to decipher search volume, and gradually building a list of good potential keywords, one-by-one.
But with AI-powered keyword research software, you can quickly come up with a big list of keywords (along with search volumes, competition, and more). You can even use advanced tools like a Keyword Cluster Generator to create groups of keywords ripe for great SEO traffic:
Of course, you can now use AI tools at every step of the content creation process, too. For example, you can create an SEO brief based on any chosen keyword, or even draft an entire first draft article that’ll be pretty damn good.
The Process of AI Keyword Research
Let’s dig into how exactly to do keyword research using AI tools.
I’m going to use my very own RightBlogger Keyword Research Tool for our examples here, because (a) I use it every day and (b) you can try it out with a free RightBlogger account.
But if you want to experiment with other AI keyword research tools (and you’ve got a solid budget), consider taking a look at tools like Ahrefs and Semrush that’ve long been steady alternatives for more advanced marketers.
Important: I don’t recommend using ChatGPT for keyword research. Sure, you can get it to come up with a list of possible keywords, but it won’t reliably give you accurate search volumes and competition ratings for those.
Step 1: Get Clear About Your SEO Goals
Before you begin, get clear about what you’re trying to achieve.
You might want to double your traffic, for instance. You’re probably also looking to make more money from the content you create. That means thinking about which keywords are likely to bring in highly qualified leads, rather than just pursuing vanity traffic opportunities.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience (and Search Intent)
Hopefully, you already know who your target audience is. Perhaps your product is aimed at affluent 40-somethings, or you’ve got a service for new parents.
If you’re not sure, get clear about your target audience before going any further, it’s a really important foundational first step to invest in understanding the people you want to reach.
You’ll also want to think about their search intent. At different stages of the buying cycle, your audience may be aiming to learn or understand something (informational intent), at the stage of comparing different solutions (commercial intent), or ready to buy with their credit card in hand (transactional intent).
Step 3: Come Up with Keyword Ideas
Now it’s time to turn to our trusty AI tools to start identifying the right keyword ideas. This is super straightforward!
All you need is a starting topic or seed keyword.
For instance, if your business sells natural sleep remedies, your seed keyword might be “sleep better”. Let’s put that into our AI keyword research tool:
Within seconds, the tool generates a huge research-backed list of potential keywords. (I could only fit a fraction of them into this screenshot.)
Right away, you’ll see three key pieces of data appear:
- Monthly Search Volume: An estimate of how many people are searching for this topic or term in the last 30 days, for the chosen country (USA in this example)
- Competition Rating: An estimate of how difficult it’ll be to rank near the top of Google search results for this topic
- Cost Per Click (CPC): An estimate of how much it costs to run an ad and appear near the top of Google search results for this term.
Altogether, these three data points provide a lot of insights about which topics & terms are going to be best for your business to rank for (which we’ll get into shortly).
In particular, we’re going to use the search volume and competition ratings in the next step.
Step 4: Choose the Right Keywords to Pursue (Volume vs Competition)
From a quick glance at the list of keyword opportunities above, you might think that “how to sleep better” would be a great keyword. It’s really relevant to your business, probably easy for you to write about, and it’s got over 12,000 monthly searches.
But that keyword is clearly popular, with that many monthly searches, and it has a “very high” competition rating… meaning it’s going to be a really tough one to rank for. It’s definitely not impossible, but it could take you months or years of effort in order to get there.
Of course, you don’t want to go too far the other way, either. You could rank well for “why do I sleep better when it’s cold”… but that only has 70 monthly searches. It’s still worth creating a piece of content targeting that keyword, but it’s unlikely to be a top priority.
Ideally, the best keywords for you are going to have:
- A medium search volume (500 to 5,000 monthly searches, on average)
- A low to medium competition rating (this gives you a better shot at ranking faster)
The best way to find these is to sort the keyword results by competition. Just click on the “Competition” label at the top of the column. You can then scroll down to all the “low” competition results.
Look for those with 500–5,000 monthly searches and copy them into a separate document, spreadsheet, or take action on them right away using the ‘Tools’ menu to save them to your account.
If all the low competition results also have a relatively low search volume, opt for those with 200+ searches if possible—or move up to some of the medium competition results:
Note: The RightBlogger keyword research tool lets you sort all the columns in your table of keywords like this—and some other free keyword tools do too… but not all.
You could also choose to download your results as a .csv (spreadsheet file) and then sort or filter them to show only “medium” competition results, organized by volume.
It’s up to you how many keywords you want to find, but I’d recommend picking around 10 at this stage.
Here’s our list for this example on “better sleep”:
- Which side is it better to sleep on (2,900, low)
- Is it better to sleep with a pillow or without (2,400, low)
- Better to sleep on right or left side (1,000 volume, low competition)
- Is it better to sleep in the nude (1,000 volume, low competition)
- How do I get a better night’s sleep (720 volume, low competition)
- Is REM sleep better than deep sleep? (720 volume, low competition)
- Music to sleep better (590 volume, low competition)
- Better sleeping position for back pain (2,400 volume, medium competition)
- Better sleep sounds (1,300, volume, medium competition)
- Yoga for sleeping better (1,000, volume, medium competition)
Turning Your Keyword List into Content (and Traffic)
Once you’ve gotten a grasp on the basics of AI keyword research, here are a couple of ways you can go even further and get more search traffic (plus leads and eventually sales).
Create Keyword Clusters
To go even further with AI keyword research, use AI tools to help you generate keyword clusters. These are ideal for low-volume keywords, as they can help give your content and website a boost in general.
Keyword clusters bring together multiple related keywords into a set of articles. Normally, you’ll have one article as the “hub” that links to all the others, which are like “spokes” pointing out from the hub. This can help you boost not just your rankings but also your conversions, leads, and sales.
An AI Keyword Cluster Generator can come up with clusters for you. (You can then use a keyword tool to check volume and competition, to see which keywords to prioritize when creating content.)
Create Quizzes Based on Your Keywords
Another great way to go further with your AI keyword research is to focus on relevant quiz-related keywords so you can drive SEO traffic with quizzes.
Quizzes can have an incredible conversion rate (think 40%!) and there are sure to be quiz-related SEO keywords that are highly relevant to your business and audience.
To find this type of keyword, use a seed keyword that incorporates the word “quiz”. Here’s an example for sleep quiz, ordered by volume:
The Interact crew interviewed Nina Clapperton from She Knows SEO about her experience optimizing quiz promotion using SEO. She explained:
“At the end of 2021, I had 74 people on my email list. By the summer of 2022, I had 5,000. […] The new subscribers from the quiz helped me hit my first $10,000 passive income month, much quicker than I expected. They also paid for themselves time and time again, and they’re super engaged. […] I have over 47% open rate.”
Crafting SEO-Friendly Content With the Help of AI
Of course, identifying keywords that offer fantastic traffic opportunities is only the beginning. You need to create a high-quality piece of content to target each keyword you’ve discovered.
AI can be a huge help here, too. That doesn’t necessarily mean using AI to do all the writing for you – in fact, I strongly recommend having plenty of human oversight in the mix. But you can save a ton of time with some clever use of AI.
In particular, it’s a great idea to:
- Use AI to help you create an SEO-focused outline or brief for your content. You can either generate a whole outline with an AI blog post outline generator or you can write the outline first, then compare yours against an AI outline just to be sure you haven’t missed anything.
- Use specialized AI tools for specific types of content. If you want to write a quiz, for instance, Interact’s AI quiz generator can create it in no time – just enter your website URL!
- Create a rough draft with the help of AI. That might mean using an all-in-one Article Writer Tool, or using AI for specific sections of your post – perhaps for adding a quick FAQ section (which can be great for incorporating keywords).
- Use an AI-powered SEO tool to help you optimize your post using keywords (including LSI keywords). Tools like Clearscope and Surfer are fantastic for this, as they’ll give you a list of the exact words and phrases to include in your content.
Get Started With AI Keyword Research Today
If you feel you’ve never quite got the hang of keyword research, that can all change today!
AI tools make keyword research really easy and intuitive. And if you pick a high-quality free AI keyword research tool, then you can play around with it as much as you like, without any risk.
Remember, you’re looking for:
- Keywords that are highly relevant to your target audience. (Don’t pick a keyword just for traffic – it needs to make sense for your business.)
- Keywords with a decent monthly search volume, ideally in the 1,000–5,000 sweet spot. You can go higher or lower if you want, though!
- Keywords that have low competition – at least to start with. Once you get the hang of ranking for these easier keywords, move up to “medium” or even “high” competition keywords for even more traffic, leads, and sales.
Give this new Ai-assisted keyword research process a try in your content workflow—and drop me a comment below if you have questions or want feedback on how to choose the right keywords to pursue 😉