Free way – Requires more digging and more time

When using SEMrush, you can sign up for a free account and get 10 requests for free. You can repeat this and use a variety of different email address to continue to get free ones as you don’t need to verify your email address.

Step #1: Find sites that are related to yours

The first step in the keyword research process is to find sites that are relevant to yours. We are going to use these sites and see what they are currently ranking for and find quality keywords that you could also go after. For the free version, you will probably want to get a list of 20-30 sites and repeat this process for all as you don’t get all the data on the sites like you would if you had a paid version. During this example, I will pretend my site is in the pet niche.

Here are some sites also in the pet niche:

Petlifetoday.com

Dogsrecommend.com

Step #2: Input into SEMRush

First we will take Petlifetoday.com and input it into SEMrush. Here you will be able to see a few things:

• When the site started
• The amount of keywords the site is ranking for
• A small snippet of the keywords they are ranking for
• The number of backlinks
• Approx. traffic

Ideally it would be great to find sites that haven’t been around for too long. Because if they are a younger site and are ranking well, chances are their ranking for some pretty good non competitive keywords.

Step #3: Take a look at the keywords the site is ranking for

We are going to see what keywords the site is ranking for and look for the ones that have a keyword difficulty of less than 50%.

As you can see the free version only allows you to see of the keywords.