Semrush is one of the best SEO tools in the market for keyword research. Today, in this post, I am going to present to you the tutorial of the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool.

Keyword research is very important for any online business. If you want to improve your business leveraging organic traffic, targeting the right keywords is crucial from the SEO viewpoint.

Semrush is one of the best keyword research tools used by many professional bloggers and top industry leaders to supercharge their organic traffic and get more leads.

Semrush comes with a powerful suite of tools for doing competitive research, keyword research, link building, rank tracking, and on-page SEO.

You can refer to my Semrush review if you want to know more about these tools.

In this blog post, we’re going to dive deep into the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool.

Semrush Keyword Magic Tool Tutorial

The Keyword Magic tool is a very powerful keyword research tool you can use to find profitable keywords for your SEO or PPC campaigns.

As per the 2019 update, Keyword Magic Tool is updated with over 120+ countries’ databases. So the overall Semrush database exceeded over 17 billion keywords. This is really huge compared to the Ahrefs database of over 7 billion keywords.

To get started with this tool, you need to enter your seed keyword. For example, I have entered “best treadmills” as the seed keyword and I am using the US database for my research.

Now the tool will display all the keywords related to my seed keyword.

You can see that there are over 5,465 keywords, the total volume of all those keywords is 116,530 and the average difficulty for this keyword to rank is 71.47%.

I will explain these metrics in the later section of this blog post.

First let us understand the different options.

You can see that the keywords are filtered with four modifiers:

1. Broad match keywords
2. Phrase match keywords
3. Exact match keywords
4. Related keywords

Let me explain this one by one.

Broad match: This will display all the keywords that contain the words related to the words in the seed keyword arranged in any order. By default, the report will show the broad match keywords and this filter will return a large number of keywords.

Phrase match: This will display all the keywords that contain the words in the seed keyword arranged in any order.

Exact match: This will return all the keywords that contain the focus keyword phrase in the exact order and in the exact form. It means that the words “best” and “treadmills” appear side by side.

Related keywords: This will give all the keywords that are related to the search query. Making use of these related keywords in the content helps rank it well, helps in driving additional traffic, and also increases the overall authority of the site. Related keywords increase the chances of your rankings for the main keyword.

These are also called LSI or semantic keywords. Including these keywords in your content helps Google understand the content on your website and establish topical relevance.

Questions:

The Keyword Magic Tool also returns all the questions that are related to the main keyword. Also, you can filter the questions to have a broad match, phrase match or the exact match keywords in it.

You can see that there are 353 questions related to my seed keyword.

You can filter the questions to contain the exact words like home, buy, run, use, and much more. This helps you target a specific subgroup of the audience.

By looking at the questions you will get an idea of what content you need to cover in your article. Including these questions while preparing your blog outline helps you a lot in satisfying the searcher’s intent. This in return helps you rank high on Google.

You can also use these questions in your campaigns and accordingly plan your strategies.

By making use of the “questions” feature you will get to know the type of questions you need to include in your article or in the FAQs section.

Keyword metrics

As you can see, for each keyword the tool gives several metrics like volume, trend, keyword difficulty, CPC, competitive density, SERP features, and results in SERP.

Let me explain them one by one.

Volume: This metric gives you the average monthly searches of a keyword over a period of 1 year. You need to keep in mind that this volume is not completely reliable.

Trend: This will display the graphs of the searcher’s interest in a keyword over a period of 12 months. If the trend is going up you can be confident that the keyword is worth targeting. If it is declining then it shows that the searcher’s interest is reducing over time and it is better to avoid that keyword.

As they have incorporated this feature it saves your time of going back and checking the keyword trend with Google Trends.

I highly recommend you not blindly go with high volume keywords. Along with volume, you need to also consider trends. Because the “volume” metric is based on the historical 12 months average data. If a keyword has performed well for the past 12 months, it doesn’t mean that it’s performing well from the last month or will perform well.

Keyword difficulty: This score is determined by considering the authority of the top 20 SERP results and analyzing how difficult the keyword is to outrank them.

The score varies from 1-100%. If the Keyword difficulty is

1. Less than 60%, then you can easily target the keyword
2. If it varies from 60-80%, then the keyword is of medium difficulty
3. If the Keyword difficulty score exceeds 80% then it has high difficulty, it also means that you need to have more SEO budget and do more link building if you want to target the keyword.

Cost per click [CPC]: It refers to how much money you need to pay as an advertiser to Google when someone clicks on your ad. If you are monetizing your blog with Google Ads, you may want to rank for high CPC keywords to get a good share of Google ad income.

Competitive density: It refers to how many advertisers are using a particular keyword in their Ad campaigns. It ranges from 0 to 1.00. If the value is 1.00 then it is of the highest difficulty.

SERP features: These are the special results that Google will display as per the search query in order to help the users with immediate results by clicking on minimum links.

There are various SERP features like a knowledge base, links, featured snippets, video, etc.

Results in SERP: This metric will give you the number of results that are appearing on the SERP for a given keyword.

Advanced filters

The Keyword Magic Tool comes with powerful filters to group the keywords. You can group the keywords “by number” and “by volume”.

These filters help you in finding the niche related keywords and also while targeting keywords for your PPC campaigns.

Let me explain this to you. If I want to target the people who need treadmills for home, I can add a filter to list the keywords that contain the word home in it.

You can see that filtering the list has returned me 607 keywords that I can easily include in my SEO campaigns. The total volume of all these keywords is 21,560 with a difficulty score of 72.97%.

By applying the filters, you can also find the commercial keywords for your money posts and also informational keywords.

While filtering the commercial keywords you need to specify the keyword modifiers with buyer intent like best, cheap, used, affordable, etc and exclude the informational modifiers like what, why, which, when, etc.

Remember that these keywords depend on the niche you are working in. This filter will return only the keywords that contain the words you mentioned.

You can see that the filter has returned me all the commercial intent keywords that have terms best and cheap in it. You can filter the keywords with modifiers like the broad match, phrase match, and exact match.

If you want to find the informational keywords to get content ideas, you can include keywords like which, why, what, etc.

If you are researching keywords for your comparison posts or alternatives posts, these filters are a great way to find potential keywords.

If you have a website that sells real products and services, targeting commercial keywords is the way to go.

As you see in the screenshot if you are writing a comparison article on treadmills, you can use “vs” as the filter and you will get to know the treadmill comparison keyword ideas

SERP features

Keyword magic tool gives you an excellent opportunity to find the keywords that help you in featuring your article in SERP features that may be a knowledge base, featured snippet, carousel, images, featured video, etc.

So you can take advantage of this filter to find the keywords that give SERP advantage.

Also, remember that the keywords that provide SERP features are highly targeted by authoritative sites in your niche as they will provide huge benefits.

If you are just beginning and your site is new, it is better to target the keywords with no SERP features as they will be easy to outrank. For this, you need to select none while applying the SERP features filter.

If you are anyhow targeting these SERP-feature keywords, it may be quite crucial for you to include schema markup and structured data in your article to compete.

To make your research even easier and to get fruitful results you can also make use of various other filters like word count, volume, KD, CPC, etc. This helps you save a lot of time analyzing the keywords manually.

Here are some tips on when to use these filters:

• Word count filter helps a lot to just display long-tail keywords. These long-tail keywords often have low competition, good search intent, and offer you good conversions.
• Although I won’t recommend you to rely on tools for keyword difficulty analysis, you can’t shortlist thousands of keywords doing manual competition analysis. In this case, Semrush’s KD filter is quite handy.
• In case if you are running AdSense blogs, targeting high CPC keywords boost your income.

Keyword manager

The keyword manager tool allows you to create keyword lists that allow upto 1000 keywords. This is a great feature that allows you to group and export the keywords in separate files.

You need to just click on the “Click to create a new list” and name it.

You can create the lists for commercial keywords, informational keywords, or post specific keywords. With this feature, you can keep the things organized so that you won’t mess up with all of them.

Without heading over to the keyword manager tool you can there itself create the lists by clicking on “Add to keyword manager” and then create a new list.

You can export the lists in the form of XLSX, CSV or CSV semicolon formats.

You may be asking yourself – “Why do I need this manager? I have my Excel sheet!”. The answer is – “With Semrush’s keyword manager, pulling the up to date metrics for the saved keywords is just a click away. But in Excel, this is something that is not possible”.

Pros and cons

Akshay strongly recommends:
Semrush 30 Days Free Trial [Exclusive]: Oct 2024 and Beyond!

Verdict

Semrush Keyword Magic Tool is a boon for PPC marketers, SEO agencies, and bloggers. For the price, the features it offers are really great.

You can use its advanced filters to find commercial keywords and boost your marketing campaigns.

Overall, the Keyword Magic Tool is a great keyword research tool you need to use to improve your SEO.

Along with this tool, Semrush also comes with various other tools like Organic research, Advertising research, Display advertising tool, Backlinks, Keyword research, Product listing Ads, Traffic Analytics, and Market explorer.

Semrush is truly an all-in-one digital marketing tool.