3 Pro Tips for Keyword Research

Today we are going to give you three top tips for getting the best out of your keyword research. These are tricks that we use to help us find you the best keyword for your business that can be done by anyone.

Google Keyword Planner:

This is usually where most people start. It is a great, free tool that gives us the data we need to see to help us make informed decisions about which keywords are best for our business. Once you log in to your Google Ads (formerly AdWords) account you can click on the wrench in the top right hand corner and then choose Keyword Planner underneath the heading Planning.

Here you will get two options but we want to start with Find New Keywords which is going to tell us the average monthly search volume, a high and low end CPC and the competitiveness of the market. If we use a school as an example we can input “London secondary school” and we will be returned with:

So not only is the keyword planner telling us what our selected keyword performance could be, it also spits out some additional ideas that we could also be targeting. “Secondary schools in London” would suggest a good term to target because there are quite a lot of searches per month and the competition is low, making sure we won’t have to spend too much on the clicks for that term.

The problem with the Google Keyword Planner is that most people use it, including your competitors and it doesn’t take an innovator to come up with “secondary schools in London” if you are one.

Fortunately, we’ve got the GKP Hack for you which will help you get the ultimate value from the tool. Let’s say we are a company that sells dog food, if we put that into the GKP we will get returned with the obvious; organic dog food, natural dog food, dog food brands, dog food etc and so on.

Here’s the good bit, we can take a URL from another website in our niche and put that into GKP:

And just like that, GKP is going to spit out a load of great keywords that our competitors probably aren’t going to see:

Also, you can use URLs from press releases, blog posts, news stories and pretty much any page that has text on it to help find new keywords. That is our first step in the beginners guide to keyword research. What you might have noticed is that these are all short and medium length terms but we want to find some great long tail keywords to target.

Long Tail Keywords

When your search for something in Google, and get down to the bottom you are likely to notice there is a section called “Searches related to…” and this is a little pot of gold for long tail keywords. Type in any keywords you want and scroll to the bottom of the page:

And we will see:

The terms related with brands we don’t want to include but we can use 5 of these additional terms in our keyword set now. Now we can take one of those related search terms and paste it into the search bar, scroll back down and repeat until we have a nice long list of keywords.

Our third tip for keyword research is to use forums and discussion boards. Go into Google and type your keyword with “+ discussion” at the end and you’ll find websites that have users talking about the industry or product:

Now we can click on one of these and see what actual customers are talking about.

From this we can pick up some extra keywords like Gluten Free Cooking or Oven Rack Placement if they are appropriate to our business.

By using the above three ideas we can expose ourselves to hundreds and sometimes even thousands of new keywords that aren’t being targeted by our competitors but are being searched by our customers. Having these different approaches can be the difference between the customer finding and purchasing with us, or spending their money elsewhere.