B2B Keyword Research Using Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest

Why put so much effort into your content if no one ends up reading it?

We are living in a world oversaturated with content – in most industries. So how do you get your voice heard in this noisy environment? That’s where keyword research comes in.

When you have a question, where do you generally go to find the answer?

Chances are, you answered what most people would – Google.

What are the Benefits of Keyword Research for B2B?

With so much content out there, how would you ever get to the top of search results?

You have to be strategic.

Sure, we’d all love for every piece of content we write to magically appear at the top of every search any of our target customers make, but it’s not realistic.

Keyword research is a necessary tactic for B2B marketers because it enables you to identify keywords that are

Relevant to your target market
Are searched for
Are low competition

These three points are the main crux of keyword research, particularly for B2B marketing.

Features and Benefits of Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest

Recently, SEO guru Neil Patel purchased the keyword research tool Ubersuggest (formerly ubersuggest.io) and incorporated it into his site, neilpatel.com.

If you aren’t familiar with Neil, you should check out his content.

Not only is he a world-renowned SEO guru, but he puts out great content (video, written, audio) that can help any marketer leveling up their skill set.

The newly re-designed tool is pure gold for B2B marketers doing keyword research.

Let’s go through some of the features and benefits of Ubersuggest.

Best of all it is FREE

There are plenty of keyword research tools out there, but most of them cost between $100-$300 a month!

With Ubersuggest, you get most of the benefits of those other tools, but at a much better price – $0.

Neil has said a few times on his various channels that he has no intention of charging for Ubersuggest.

And it seems like he wants to add more free SEO tools to his site.

Search Volume Estimate

For each keyword you input, Ubersuggest will estimate the monthly searches.

This data is likely pulled from Google API somehow, but I might be wrong.

Many tools indeed have this kind of estimate, and they are rarely 100% correct.

However, it’s a great benchmark. You can see if one keyword has significantly more searches than another.

Cost Per Click

While this is less relevant for SEO, it still gives you an indicator of the value (at least the value provided by Google) of that particular keyword.

This data pulled from Google API as it aligns with the numbers seen in Google keyword planner tool.

Paid Difficulty

Another data point that is probably less relevant for SEO, but still a good metric to have in mind.

It indicates how difficult it is to rank for this keyword for paid Google ads (formerly “AdWords”).

SEO Difficulty

Though it’s not 100% clear how this number is arrived at, being able to take the difficulty score and compare it to the search volume is the kind of thing SEOs dream of.

Until now, a lot of people would utilize strategies such as the Keyword Golden Ratio. However, Ubersuggest now gives you an easier way to do it without complicated calculations.

Keyword Ideas

Now we get to the meat and potatoes.

Ubersuggest, as the name implies, not only gives you solid metrics – it suggests potential keywords, including long-tail keywords, for you to try.

You can look at similar keywords and find one with a sufficient amount of monthly searches but lower in competition.

You even get this fun word bubble from Neil telling you about your keyword.

B2B Keyword Use-Case Using Ubersuggest

I know what you are thinking – this all sounds great, but how can I use this to my advantage?

If you are writing new content and want to establish keyword(s) to optimize it for.

Let’s go step-by-step through the process. Assuming you aren’t coming into this with an idea in mind, you can use Ubersuggest to help you craft the entire focus of your post.

Step 1: Initial Keyword

What’s the main focus of your product, service, or blog?

Start there.

If, for example, your blog generally focuses on topics regarding project management, try that high-level keyword first.

Mouse over to “SD” (SEO Difficulty) and re-order it to go from lowest to highest.

The goal here is to find a keyword with a medium-to-high amount of monthly searches but a low level of difficulty.

Perfect!

This long-tail keyword has almost 2,000 searches monthly, but a difficulty level of only 8.

It would be a great keyword to use.

Step 2: Gathering Additional Keywords for Your Post

While your main keyword is the one you are going to try to rank for the most, having secondary keywords sprinkled throughout your post serves several purposes:

Puts you in contention for top search results for other keywords, even if the monthly searches are low
Can act and as semantic keywords for your post, which will be read by Google as supporting your initial keyword
Gives you more ideas for sub-sections of your post

Ubersuggest makes this easy to find keywords for H2 or H3 sections in your post!

Step 3: Analyze The Top Ranking Posts

One of the benefits of Ubersuggest, beyond keyword research and analysis, is that it shows you the top 100 pages that rank for a given keyword, as well as some other stats relating to them.

Since you are trying to get position 1, why not take a look at what its current inhabitant has done to get there?

First, you’ll notice that though the exact phrase is not used in their title.

Google’s algorithm is picking up on the semantic similarities between “Program Manager vs. Project Manager” and “Project Management vs Program Management.”

While the differences are minor to the human mind, the fact that Google was able to understand the complexity of natural language is pretty impressive.

But, that’s for a different blog post.

Now, let’s take a look at the content itself.

If we take the entire post and create a word cloud, showing which key phrases and words are used most, we can learn a lot about how Google decided this particular post should be listed first.

By pasting the content of the post into a free word cloud generator, we get a great 30,000-foot view of the main focus of the post.

As you may have suspected, the keywords “program”, “project”, and “manager” are all featured prominently.

Let’s take a deeper look at how many times, exactly, some of these key phrases appear.

Two of the most critical keywords appear very often in this post – 15 times for “program manager” and 18 times for “project manager.”

However, the exact phrase that this post is ranking for doesn’t even appear a single time in the post.

The post is also not incredibly long, only 735 words.

Ok, so with this information in mind, there are a few things you can do in your post to have a better shot at ranking higher:

Use the exact phrase – The currently #1 ranking post does not use the exact phrase once, so you can have the advantage there. Don’t keyword stuff, but at least use it in the title.
Skyscraper – A very popular content tactic among SEO experts these days is the skyscraper technique. Essentially, find a high-ranking post and write a similar post, but just make it 10x better. In this case, the post was only 735 words which means it wasn’t very in-depth. If you go deeper and make something that is long-form, you have a great shot at overtaking the #1 spot
Semantic keywords – This post is a clear indication that Google values semantic keywords nearly as much (maybe just as much?) as exact match keywords. You can see that because the post didn’t even have a single use of the main phrase, but is stuffed with semantically similar terms.

Ubersuggest for B2B Keyword Research: The Verdict

A free tool to give you actionable insights is unheard of.

To get data on competitiveness, overall monthly searches, and suggested related keywords is just unbelievable.

Not to mention being able to see all the posts that rank for your keyword, along with all the other data.

It also looks like Neil might be planning to include some new features in the tool.

It could be a cool feature – an engine that suggests content to help you rank higher? Hopefully, it is included free, but certainly possible this feature will require some amount of money.

What do you think about the new and improved Ubersuggest? Leave your comments below!