If you want to dominate the search results in your niche or market, make sure to find the right kind of keywords with correct intent and competition levels that you can tolerate, and then publish relevant content.

In this post we shall take a look at some simple techniques that you can implement right away to boost your existing keyword research techniques to get some extra mileage.

1. Use multiple sources for keyword research

Google keyword planner is the principal tool to start keyword research with. The data it shows comes directly from google, which is the biggest search engine and receives the highest number of search queries.

Feed one seed keyword or phrase and it will instantly show upto 800 keyword related to the seed.

However it is quite limited in terms of the data it shows. For any given seed keyword or phrase, google keyword planner shows only around 800 keyword ideas, all of which may not always be related to the actual seed keyword.

To overcome this limitation make it a habit to use as many different sources as you can to find more keywords and ideas.
Some of the best places are:

1. Google keyword suggestions – 7 best free tools to get keyword suggestions from Google in 2016
2. Related keywords
3. Forums – How to do keyword research on forum sites to find great content ideas
4. Question answer sites
5. Competitor sites
6. Social sharing sites like Pinterest, Instagram.

Widen your spectrum of tools for doing keyword research. You would find more and more keywords and ideas.

2. Look for topics/ideas rather than plain search terms

The very process of keyword research tells our mind to look for new and different words in order to come up with content ideas. You just keep running automated tools to extract more and more keywords out of all known search engines and sources.

This process is correct but has certain limitations. Firstly there are a lot of keyword that even the tools are unable to report. Automated keyword extraction tools will most of the time show only those keywords that are most popular or in-demand. These keyword have great traffic potential, but at the same time they are also highly competitive.

The goal of keyword research is to bring up topics and ideas around which content can be and should be developed.

Therefore its quite important to think in terms of what are people looking for and what do they want to know about a something.

Suppose you building a website on japan tourism. Some keywords could be –

1. japan travel guide
2. japan tourist attractions

You could write a lot of content around those kind of keywords.
You would soon run of ideas because the list of such specific keywords is usually small.
You are just writing another piece of content like many others that would weakly compete with rest, and get you no lead in marketing.

Now consider this keyword – Best places to see in japan in winter

It has a much stronger search intent and a much more unique topic to write content that would stand out distinct from the rest. Of course there are benefits of it being a long tail keyword that will likely have less competition and would be easier to rank.

The goal of keyword research is not to find words to fill your titles, h1s and content with, but to discover a topic to write about. Its not a big technical thing, just a different approach with lots of marketing benefits.

So start writing for “intent” rather than just “word”. Think!

And where to find ideas

Where-ever there is content, there are topics and ideas. Go out to other sites in your niche, like forums, question answer sites. Search popular content sharing sites for your main keywords and see what people are talking about. And you would find some great topics and ideas.

3. Keep an eye on trends to find great and easy keywords

Lots of tools out there can help you find topics that have become very popular recently or will be in near future. Here you can find some really exclusive keywords that you can grab early before others start chasing them.

Start with Google trends to see what is actually trending. The rising keywords would give you an insight of popular terms in your market.

Check the forums and question answer sites related to the niche and see what topics are being discussed at present. These would give you a complete insight into the market status.

Dig deep for Long tail keywords

Long tail keywords is

Analyse keyword competition

Avoiding the mistake of picking up a highly competitive keyword can save you a lot of time and energy. The idea is simple enough. Pick up keywords that you can easily rank for without immense SEO power.

Check the Geography – Localize

Check the search intent

Do it more and more

Keyword research is the core of your content marketing strategy and it must absolutely be done right without the slightest mistake. The more you do it, the better

Resources and further reading

• The New SEO — It’s About People, Intent, & Meaning
• How User Intent Will Forever Inform Successful Keyword Strategies

Semrush is a great tool for SEOs, Bloggers and Affiliate marketers. It is an all in one competition analysis tool that reveals the keywords, backlinks of your competitor’s website.

If you are building websites and want to drive more organic traffic, semrush provides valuable data that can help scale up your online marketing efforts.

With keywords data you can discover new content opportunities, and with backlink reports you can find new places to build backlinks for your own site.

If you are doing any kind of serious content marketing or managing ppc campaign, a comprehensive suite of tools like semrush can make a huge difference.

In this post we take a quick look at some of the most useful features of semrush.

1. Find keywords a website is ranking for

If you need to check what keywords your own website is ranking for, you can use the Google Search Console. But when you need to check the keywords of your competitor’s websites then you need a competitive intelligence tool like Semrush.

With semrush you can check the keywords of any website and use this data to discover lots of content opportunities and angles for your own site. You can target these new keywords on your own website to generate more organic traffic and consequently more sales and leads.

Chances are that you would come across keywords that you have not yet used on your website or written an article about. Now that you know such keywords, you can straight away publish content and get more traffic from google.

As semrush shows the volume date as well, you can prioritise your selection on those keywords that have higher volume or lower competition. That way you have a data driven accurate strategy for your content marketing plan.

Semrush also tells the position of a website in google for each keyword which gives you an idea of how the competition levels likely are.

2. Check traffic of website (fairly accurate)

With Semrush you get the traffic estimates of any given website over a large period of time. You can see how much traffic other websites in your niche are getting and how strong each of them are. The ones getting more traffic likely have more content or more backlinks or both.

By carefully analysing these high traffic websites, you can get an idea of what you need to do for your website to get more traffic.

The traffic estimates indicate the popularity of a website and how good their SEO is. Websites receiving more traffic have likely done a better job at SEO.

3. Find the top ranking pages of website

If you can find out which pages or posts of your competitor website are getting the most traffic you can steal those topics right away and publish content on your own blog. That’s an absolutely great idea to increase your traffic quickly.

The above report inside semrush shows the top pages (by organic traffic) of pinterest.com and how much traffic each page is getting along with the number of keywords that are driving that much traffic.

Popular posts mean that the posts are getting a lot of traffic either due to high search volume or due to high rankings.

4. Find close competitors and similar websites

When starting a seo campaign in a new niche, its important to check other sites that are in the same niche and performing well.

These sites show up what kind of content is ranking well on Google and what similar things we can do as well in this niche market. From these sites we can quickly get lots of content ideas and topics and save time.

This is a great way to build a content plan for a brand new website specially if you are less familiar with the niche. All you have to do is study and follow other sites and take inspirations from these.

5. Find popular topics on the web around a keyword

Viral topics that are popular across the web on social sites is a great source of ideas for content on your website. Topics that are popular are likely to generate lots of traffic and you can publish content around these topics on your website as well.

In the above example we used the keyword “funny dog” to find popular topics on the internet around that keyword. Semrush shows the url of each content article along with facebook shares and number of backlinks.

Metrics like number of social shares indicate the popularity of an article. Sort by these metrics to find the most popular articles from across the web and get an idea of what the audience is looking for.

6. Find the ppc ads and keywords of website

If you plan to run ppc campaigns to drive targeted traffic to your or a client’s website then spying on competitor’s ads is a good place to start.

By looking at your competitor’s ads you can find out what kind of ad copies, headlines and keywords are converting for that market. Next you can use these ad copies to model your own variations. Save time and don’t reinvent the wheel.

Competitive intelligence and research is extremely importantly for ppc marketers whether you are driving traffic for a client or your own business websites.

There are many other tools that provide similar data like https://www.ispionage.com/ and https://www.spyfu.com/. However if you wan’t a single tool for all needs then Semrush is the tool to go after.

7. Monitor and Audit your own website projects

Audit your own website’s using Semrush project management tool. Its a collection of tools that scan your website and look for seo issues that are affecting your site. Check for onpage factors, backlinks and many other things.

The Backlink audit tool reports the bad quality and toxic backlinks that could have a negative effect on your site. check the report and take necessary steps to fix the problem.

8. Check backlinks of website

If you wan’t to know how a website is ranking high on google, check its backlink profile and see who is linking to them. The backlink profile of a website reveals how strong its link authority is and it also enables you to find potential opportunities to build links for your own website as well.

Semrush has a comprehensive backlink checking tool that comes with the Pro plan. It allows you to check the backlinks, anchor text, dates when seen, backlink types, link attributes and many other details.

Here is a quick screenshot showing the backlinks of pinterest.com. Now of ofcourse your website won’t be having so many backlinks.

To build backlinks the first and the most critical step is to find websites where backlinks can be built. This is not an easy or quick task. It takes lots of search and research over many months.

However, one easy technique is to take the look at the backlink profile of your competitor website. Those places where your competition has backlinks, you can get a backlink too. And to check the backlink profile of your competitor you need to good enough tool like Semrush.

This is perhaps the most powerful application of any seo tool. People always want to see the backlinks of other websites in order to find opportunities to create backlinks for their own site.

There are other backlink checker tools like Ahrefs and SeoMajestic.

9. Generate keyword ideas with volume data

Semrush can generate keyword ideas just like the google keyword planner. It generates a lot more keyword keywords than the google keyword planner and also shows the keyword volumes.

Google keyword planner stopped showing the exact volume numbers recently. You need to have campaigns running in order to see the volume metrics.

10. Check advertisers on a website

A lot of websites use display ads to make money and such websites are called publishers. If you wish to know what ads are being shown on a publisher website, semrush has a tool for that named “Display Advertising”.

This tool will tell you which websites/urls are serving their ads on the ad units on a particular website. The ads could be coming from any ad network like Google Adsense, media.net etc.

By looking at the advertisers on a certain website, you can get an idea on whether there are lots of high paying advertisers in that particular niche or not.

If you see a lot of niche relevant ads on a website, its an indication of a commercial niche that has products and services being advertised by companies and brands.

On the other hand if you see very generic non targeted ads, then the niche does not have a lot of high paying advertisers.

This tool can be used to analyse the market in a niche and see if its profitable to build a site on it.

Conclusion

That was a very brief review of the most useful features of Semrush. Semrush is just one of the many paid seo tools out there in the market, but it packs together some of the most essential features that every SEO needs.

Having all the necessary tools in one place along with data that is highly accurate, makes semrush an excellent investment for any seo professional or affiliate marketer.

Some of the major competitors are Ahrefs and SeoMajestic. Each tool has a slightly different set of features and a comes at a different price range. I have personally used many of these paid tools and found Semrush to be an excellent all in one tool where you get all the tools that you would need without having to pay a big subscription fee.

If you are into affiliate marketing, blogging, client SEO, PPC services or any similar domain, Semrush can get you a lot of useful and powerful data about any niche or marketing helping you to do better in your online marketing goals.

Amazon is one of the biggest ecommerce site and a great place to find popular keywords. As you type in your search in amazon.com, it would start popping suggestions around the search term to indicate what other peoples are searching.

By scraping these keyword suggestions, we can get lots of useful keyword ideas around a particular product or keyword. And then ofcourse build content targeting those keywords to rank fast and easy.

SeoStack Chrome Extension

The Free SeoStack Chrome Extension is an excellent tool to scrape keyword suggestions from amazon.com
For every seed keyword, it adds modifiers like alphabet letters and numbers and sends them to amazon to get keyword ideas.

Here is a quick screenshot –

get keywords from amazon with seostack chrome extension

Here is how to use it.

1. Put in your seed keyword in the left box
2. Select Amazon as the source.
3. Click Start

Almost instantly, the data table on the right will be filled with lots of keywords from amazon. The tool can generate over 300 keywords per seed keyword.

Get search volume and cpc data

After generating keywords, click the button labelled “Get volume+cpc data” and it would open the Google Keyword Planner in a new window.

Login to your keyword planner account and feed in the keywords to get they volume and cpc data.

Conclusion

If you are building an amazon affiliate site to sell products then its essential to find and target the right keywords that have search volumes.

The keyword tool reveals the keywords that are being searched on amazon and keyword planner tells the search volume. The only thing left is to pick the right keyword with a decent search volume and low competition so that it is easy to rank.

Most importantly it shows monthly search volumes and cpc bid data for keywords. This makes it the most valuable keyword research tool and still it is free. Knowing the search volumes allows bloggers and internet marketers decide which keywords to choose for seo.

Furthermore, it allows to view search volumes for individual geographic locations around the world at the city level. This makes it really very powerful.

The only barrier is the 800 keyword limit and the choice of keywords shown. The keyword ideas shown sometimes may not be relevant to the seed keyword and be a little off the track.

Right now the focus is on long tail keywords and finding those with keyword planner can be a little difficult and time consuming. That is why we use other tools like keyword suggestions and related keyword searches to find long tail keywords.

However in this post we shall be putting more focus on how to overcome those barriers and Keyword Planner show more keywords and the long tail keywords. This is no magic, just neat little techniques that will make Keyword Planner retrieve more data than it usually does.

1. Start with the seed keyword

Start with your most basic seed keyword and generate keyword ideas. Choose geography and language as necessary.

Sort and save CSV

First of all sort the keywords in descending order of monthly search volumes. Then download the csv file. The keywords with the highest search volume should be on top.

Open the csv file in your favorite spreadsheet application and review it.

Note keywords with high volume

Meanwhile add all keywords to the plan. The list will continue to grow as we find more keywords. At the end all keywords can be downloaded at one go.

2. Dig high volume keywords again with “close match”

In the next step start digging down the high volume keywords from the previous step. Make sure to check the option “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” under Keyword options box.

This step is going to bring you lots of long tail keywords. Keywords with a monthly search volume of as low as 2000 can expand into multiple long tail keywords when used like this.

The process needs to be done for every individual keyword idea that seems to be big enough. Just keep adding all results to the ad plan to save them all in one place.

3. Dig using competitor Urls

This step is going to further reveal more keywords. But it is different than the previous ones. Find out the top competitor urls for your keywords.

Find your competitors

If you don’t already know, who your competitors are, just search using some keyword phrase and note the top 10 or 20 results. These are your competitors who you need to outrank through SEO. These could be forum sites, blogs, or ecommerce sites.

Get keywords of each competitor

Now take each of these competitor urls one by one and feed them into keyword planner. It would then once again come up with new and newer keyword ideas around these urls. The good thing being, that most of these keywords would be long tail and with some good search volume numbers.

4. Get more long tail keywords with keyword suggestions

The above steps would generate lots of long tail keywords. If you wish to have more, generate keyword suggestions from Google.

Generate keyword suggestions

Use the SeoStack Chrome extension to do this.
It is a free extension that generates keyword suggestions from Google and Youtube around a seed keyword.

Get keywords suggestions

Get search volume data for keyword suggestions

Prepare a complete list and then feed these keywords back into Keyword Planner to get the search volume data. Now you should have plenty more keywords compared to what was found with the keyword planner alone.

Final Thoughts

Long tail keywords are the most important technique and tactic to build organic traffic today. They are the cornerstone of modern SEO. Finding them takes time, experience and a proper understanding of the market you are trying to target.

If you are looking for more keyword research tools, check out some of these previous posts –

11 Best free keyword research tools for SEO in 2016
7 best free tools to get keyword suggestions from Google in 2016

Although most free tools are quite limited in features, they are still very useful. With some experience and practice you can learn to extract valuable keywords out of these free tools.

Later on you can switch to some of the paid tools like SeoStack, when you need to save time in exchange for money.

Here is a list of the most popular free keyword research tools, that you can start using today to find great keywords and content ideas.

1. Google Keyword Planner

Google keyword planner is the first tool to start keyword research with. It finds keyword ideas around a seed keyword and provides search volume data along with that.

However, on its own, the Keyword Planner shows a very limited number of keywords. For every seed keyword it shows around 800 related keyword ideas whereas there are a lot many more keywords waiting to be discovered. To overcome this constraint use keyword suggestion tools to generate more keywords.

Another important feature of keyword planner is that it allows users to add their own keywords generated elsewhere, and get the search volume and cpc data for those keywords.

2. SeoStack Chrome extension

Seostack keyword tool Chrome extension

The SeoStack Chrome extension is a tool that generates keyword suggestions from Google and Youtube using a seed keyword. Its absolutely free.

It modifies the original keyword by adding alphabets and numbers and then uses it to generate keyword suggestions. This way, it is able to generate upto 400 keyword suggestions around each seed keyword.
It also supports specifying multiple seed keywords at once.

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is used to determine the popularity of keywords and discover new keywords that have been trending recently.

As a keyword research tool, Google Trends can reveal new keywords that only few of your competitors would be knowing about. Such keywords can often have low competition since they are new and few or no one is targeting them yet.

4. AnswerThePublic

answerthepublic.com keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic is a simple keyword suggestion tool that generates keywords from Google autocomplete. Similar to SeoStack, it adds modifiers to the original seed keyword including alphabets, numbers and query terms and then generates hundreds of keyword suggestions around each seed keyword.

5. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is another very simple keyword suggestion tool that generates keywords from Google. It is a free web based tool and is quite old and popular too.

It can generate upto around 300-400 keyword suggestions per seed keyword. Then each of the resulting keyword can be further expanded to produce more keywords under it.

6. Hypersuggest

Hypersuggest is similar to Ubersuggest but along with Google it fetches keywords from Youtube too. Web based and very simple to use. Hypersuggest supports adding modifiers to the seed keyword both by prefixing and suffixing. This allows it to produce it more keywords than Ubersuggest.

It also has predefined templates for adding question based modifiers like “who, what, when, where, why, how”. This allows users to quickly search for question-style keywords around seed keywords.

7. Soovle

Soovle is yet another keyword suggestion utility. It is web based and supports lots of engine including google, bing, yahoo, amazon, ebay, youtube and more.

However it is limited in the amount of keywords generated. It does not use any modifiers with original keyword and therefore fetches only about 8-10 keyword suggestions around the seed keyword as it is.

8. SeoChat keyword suggestion tool

This tool generates keywords from Google, Bing, Youtube and Amazon. Uses alphabets a-z to modify the original keyword and generates keyword suggestions using them. Expect upto 300 keywords from each search engine which makes it over 1000 keywords.

9. SeoChat related keywords tool

This is another useful tool from SeoChat. It provides upto 8-10 related keyword phrases for a given keyword phrase. It then allows to dig further to get related keywords for each of the related keywords retrieved in the first step.

Related keywords are those keywords that appear at the bottom in google search results marked as “Related”. These are another great source of finding keyword ideas.

10. Bing webmasters tool

The Bing webmaster tool is similar to Keyword planner and it shows keywords related to a seed keyword, along with search volume data. However this data comes from the Bing search engine. The searches are those that were made on bing.com

11. Google webmasters

The Google webmasters tool is used to find what keywords your website is ranking for. It often reveals many keywords that you did not target in your content, but Google sees those related to your content.

In this way, Google itself tells you the related keywords for your site and these keywords give you opportunities to write more unique content to further boost seo.

Conclusion

Each keyword tool has different features in terms of where it fetches keywords from, and what additional data is made available.

Keyword Planner and Bing Webmasters Tool allow users to directly access keyword data along with search volumes. Whereas the rest of the keyword suggestion tools just find similar keywords.

So go ahead and use all those keyword tools to do some great keyword research and then write great content for SEO.

Keywords decide who comes to your site and why. The better it is done, brighter are the prospects of getting traffic that is targeted and meets your goals be it business or something else.

In 2016, and things have significantly changed in the arena of search engines, seo and keyword research.

Users are more “Google-aware” than before, more searches are made than before, Google is better at analyzing content than before and so on. This entire evolution brings new challenges and opportunities at the same time for the SEO and internet marketer.

In other words you need to upgrade your keyword research strategy to meet with the demands of both your audience and the search engine.

1. Look for meaningful topics instead of words/phrases

The Google search engine has made serious advancements in its capacity to understand and analyse content. It is no more merely a content indexing machine that can be controlled with a bunch of keywords and told to rank your content above others.

Google can now actually “read your content” and understand the concept, quality and purpose of it. Yes, it really does that just like a human. If you are curious to know how, then read about Latent semantic indexing.

So it is of utmost importance to actually write content around meaningful topics instead of just a keyword phrase for the sole purpose of targeting that keyword only.

This means a lot for those producing content –

1. Firstly, you can write about different and diverse topics around a keyword. Google will treat them all appropriately, and show them in search results whenever and where ever relevant.

2. Secondly, google can actually determine the quality of your content much like a human reader. So spam techniques like outsourcing cheap articles, using spun articles etc will all start to fail.

Assuming that you are serious about producing quality content, the first point is of great benefit. That is, you should use high intent, meaningful topics and write quality and unique content around it.

Consider the following examples –

1. how to make strawberry cake at home – descriptive, clear intent, nice topic to write about
2. easy strawberry cake recipes – descriptive, but less intent-full compared to previous one
3. strawberry cake recipes – Very generic !

So if you write on the first keyword, you have something very specific to write about. It makes your job easier, produces unique content and Google rewards you with justice.

Further more, you can actually come up with many different and unique topics like that and create multiple different posts or pieces of content. This gives you an opportunity to make your site appear more relevant and more heavy weight in the eyes of Google.

2. Go beyond conventional tools

Call out keyword research and everyone jumps onto Keyword Planner. Yes its the default tool to start keyword research perhaps because it tells you the search volumes.

It has some really intelligent mechanism in place which retrieves some of the best keyword ideas around a seed keyword. But it is just the very first step and a lot lies ahead.

There are lots of other places where keywords can be found and retrieved from. These include keyword suggestions and related keyword searches data from all search engines. These include Google, Bing, Yahoo, Youtube etc.

The more places you look, the more keywords you discover and sooner are you able to reach your keyword research goals.

Don’t feel intimidated and start using multiple different tools to gather keywords from different sources.

There are plenty of tools that can help you gather keyword data from these additional sources. Check out the following tutorials to learn more

6 Top free tools to find long tail keywords for your content
7 best free tools to get keyword suggestions from Google in 2016

SeoStack is a powerful keyword research tool that allows you to gather keywords from many different sources including Keyword Planner, keyword suggestions from Google, bing, youtube, yahoo, amazon and ebay.

Try it today – http://www.seostack.net

3. Use social sites to find popular and viral topics

Do not confine yourself to just keyword tools when doing keyword research. Numerous topics and ideas exist out there that these tools simply cannot reveal.

Social platforms like niche forum sites, question answer sites are a great place to find traffic intensive popular topics that you can write about.

Read a previous on how to find great keyword ideas and topics on forums here –
How to do keyword research on forum sites to find great content ideas

Brian Dean calls this the skyscraper technique and it is precisely about stealing popular topics from elsewhere and building better content to outrank your rivals.

Another way to find popular content is using tools like Buzzsumo that help you find content that have been shared a lot on social networks like twitter and facebook.

Apart from these, there are many other social sharing sites where you can find popular content and topics. These include Reddit, Pinterest, Google+ communities and many others. The idea is simple. Find out content that has gone viral and use the idea.

Summing up the list –

• Niche forums and question answer sites
• Facebook pages and groups
• Pinterest
• Reddit
• Google+ Communities
• Buzzsumo
• etc …

4. Monitor Trends

Trends give a glimpse of what kind of keywords might come next in a few months or years. Planning content in advance for such keywords could be a great strategy to take lead ahead of others.

Google Trends can show you keywords that have become popular recently and are rising the traffic charts. Targeting these keywords in your content could get you ranked without much seo, since competition on these keywords might be lower.

If you are in a market segment where newer versions of products or entirely new products are launched regularly, then you can target upcoming keyword in advance using trends data.

Other than Google Trends, social network sites and social sharing sites also help to discover new and topics. Whenever something new has arrived, people discuss it everywhere. You just need to keep a vigil and act prompt.

5. Investigate your competitors’ keywords

Your competitors’ have content which is already ranking for keywords that you wish to target. Finding out those keywords can uncover lots of new keyword ideas.

And sometimes you may be able to outrank your competitor simply because you possess a superior backlink strategy.

There are a number of ways to go about this. The free way is by using keyword planner. Make a list of some of your competitors’ and feed their urls into keyword planner one by one.

It would then come up with various keyword ideas that google saw related to those url in some way. These keyword may not necessarily be the ones that rank your competitors and send them traffic, but they are related to some degree.

If you want to find out the exact keywords your competitors are ranking for, then better use some paid tool like Semrush

6. Steal popular topics from your competitors’ blog

This is a very very easy and quick way to find bright and high traffic topics and ideas for content. Simply take a look at your competitors’ blog and see if there is a section marked “Popular Posts” or something similar.

Those are the posts that are driving lots of traffic to your rival. Steal them and write better content and launch. This is a very commonly used tactic to actually build traffic quickly without investing much time into keyword research.

However there are some conditions. First, you need to be able to produce content that will be superior to that of the other site. Secondly you need a sound backlink strategy to give an initial boost to your content. If you can manage these, then you can quickly generate lots of traffic.

Otherwise focus on low competition keywords first, establish domain authority and then go after this technique.

7. Identify and target intent-full keywords

Search terms that are descriptive enough to express the intention of the user are called intent-full keywords.

Google is able to intercept the message behind such keywords and then refines the search results accordingly. Google is increasingly getting better at this.

If you search for – laptop repair service nyc the search results would show you the best shops and places where you can get your laptop repaired.

Search for “what is the distance between earth and sun” and Google tells you the answer.

All this is because Google is actually able to interpret and intercept your intention and this is called intelligence.

Keywords like those have a heavy intent. The user was looking for a very specific piece of information. Given the fact that google can understand the intent behind the query, it can relate it to content with similar intents.

Every niche or market has a different pattern of intent-full keywords. Work on it and identify the most useful ones.

Lets take some examples

Top seo companies in seattle – you are a local seo agency in seattle
How to increase adsense income on your blog – Nice topic for a make money blog
10 tips to speed up your Windows 10 laptop – Nice topic for a tech blog on windows
Best places to visit in Japan in winters – Nice topic for a tourism blog

8. Focus on the long tail

So long tail keywords are keywords that are 3-4 words or more in length. Its been told numerous times that they are the future of seo because they are intent-full, offer low competition in seo etc etc etc.

Long tail keywords are the key to find relevant topics in any subject. As already pointed that Google is getting better at analyzing the relevance and intent of both content and search queries, it becomes important to shift focus on long tail keywords.

Here are some previous posts that can help you with long tail keywords

3 good reasons why you should use and target Long Tail keywords in seo
6 Top free tools to find long tail keywords for your content

9. Review your own keywords

As you start building content on your own site, google starts ranking your site for a variety of keywords including those that you did not target. You would use Google Webmasters to track keywords that are ranking your site.

This is a common phenomenon. You write a post about a particular topic or keyword phrase and google sees it relevant for many other search terms and starts ranking your content somewhere.

The interesting part is that you are able to grab those new keywords that you were probably unaware of earlier. Now you can publish more content around those distantly related keywords to generate more search engine exposure. Simple and easy!

10. Do it more and regularly

Keyword Research is never done enough. Its a never ending process of finding new keywords that went undetected or those that have just come into existence.

The market around every product or service evolves over time and is doing so more rapidly today. People are learning to search for things in new ways which brings us new keywords.

Keep an eye on niche related social sites, competitors’ sites and blogs, news portals and all other sites related to your market segment. These would help you discover new ideas to write content about.

Final thoughts

Mastering the art of keyword research takes time and even more time has to be invested in every niche or market that you plan to target. Every market has a different pattern of search queries and identifying these core patterns enables the marketer to understand the market better.

With better keyword research you produce better content and eventually get better exposure on search engines. That is the ultimate goal, traffic!

Hope that you are able to get lots of it. Good Luck doing keyword research.

Related keyword searches appear at the bottom of the search results in Google. These are the search terms that are highly related and relevant to your current search term and are being searched by users.

Google related keyword searches

Related keywords provide a comprehensive overview of what people are looking for. This further helps discover great and unique content ideas for new blog posts and articles. That’s what marketers need, more topics to spam Google 🙂

Get related keywords from Google using SeoStack

SeoStack can fetch related keyword searches from Google and Bing. Upto 8 related keywords are fetched for each seed keyword. For best results, provide a list of multiple keywords to generated upto 8x more keywords.

Download and install SeoStack.

1. Launch SeoStack
2. Click Tools > Related Keywords
3. Enter list of seed keywords on the left box. Select Google as the source. Click Start

Fetching related keywords from Google is takes some time, because the tool has to make a real human like query to google.com for each keyword and then read the related keywords on the page.

Generate search volume and cpc data

Once the keywords have been generated, save them to a list. Click on the Save to List button at the bottom.

Next open the list from the keyword list box on right.
Select the newly generated keywords.
Click the “Get Volume Data” button at the bottom and click start.

It will now fetch search volume data and cpc from Keyword Planner and save it along-size the keywords in the list. With the search volume data you can pick out keywords with a better traffic potential.

More keywords

Google provides keyword data in many different ways. Besides related keywords, you also have keyword suggestions and keyword ideas from keyword planner.

SeoStack can get keyword suggestions from many search engines including Google. Read more here.

It is the 2nd largest search engine right after Google, though it belongs to Google anyways.

If you are planning to use videos as a part of your content marketing strategy, you would need to do keyword research just like you do for blog posts, articles and other forms of textual content.

Keyword research can be done right on Youtube to find the most popular and high traffic keywords for maximum impact.

Although Youtube does not provide a direct keyword research tool, like Keyword Planner, there are still many ways to extract keyword data from the search engine.

In this post we shall be talking about simple yet effective ways to find the keywords that people are searching on Youtube and how to measure the traffic potential of each keyword.

1. Get keyword suggestions from Youtube

The first place to look for keywords is the search box on youtube.com, which shows keyword suggestions as you type in. Type in your seed keyword and see what youtube has to suggest around that.

There are plenty of free tools out there, that can be used to generate and pull out keyword suggestions from Youtube. One such tool is the SeoStack Chrome extension. Download SeoStack Chrome Extension

Get keywords from youtube using seostack chrome extension

Install SeoStack Chrome Extension

Enter seed keyword on the left box and select Youtube as the Source. Then click Start. The data table should get filled up with keywords within seconds.

These keyword suggestions would give you a clear view of what kind of searches are being made on Youtube around your seed keyword. These are the topics on which you can make videos and get your share of traffic.

Check search volume

Having generated keyword suggestions, the next important thing to do is to get the search volume. With the search volume data it is easy to identify the keywords that have a higher traffic potential.

Simply put in the keywords in the keyword planner volume tab and click Go.

The rest you know!

2. Check trends

Google Trends provides trend data for Youtube search as well. The data indicates, the rise in popularity of keywords in Youtube’s search.

Use it to determine the popularity of keywords and find new upcoming keywords that have been trending recently.

3. Check title and tags of competitor videos

A neat little trick to find keywords for youtube videos is by looking at the meta keywords of your competitor’s videos. Search with the seed keyword and analyze the top videos one at a time.

Take close look at the titles of the top videos. These would give you an idea about what videos are being watched most, and which ones are being ranked better.

Hint : Steal some of the best titles and see if you can make a better video and out rank them.

To find the meta tags, use this tiny Chrome extension called Tags for Youtube. It shows the tags of each video in the description box just below the player.

Otherwise, open the source code of the video page, by pressing Ctrl+U and find meta name=”keywords” in the page source and check the keywords.

The meta keywords might not always contain very useful information, but would most of the time tell you how your competitors have tried to optimize their videos. You just need to out perform them.

4. Check keywords of competitor videos

This is a super powerful technique that would reveal instantly, keywords related to a video and you can target these in your video content strategy.

Simply feed in the competitor video url into Google keyword planner, and it would show the keywords related to that video, and lots of them.

These keywords would often be long tail in nature and would help you discover a diverse set of keyword options to come up with content or video ideas.

Final thoughts

The rules for video content is very similar to text, so treat them alike. Find popular keywords and topics, assess traffic opportunity, estimate ranking potential and target.

Rest of the work lies in making a nice video and battling hard to get it ranked above your competitors, which ofcourse is an entirely different topic of discussion.

So go ahead with your video marketing strategy and do let us know if you wish to share anything.

Looking to generate more traffic through youtube videos ? Start doing keyword research on Youtube and find popular and traffic-full keywords and use them.

Just like Google, youtube also provides keyword suggestions which show what people are searching on Youtube. These keywords will clearly show what your audience is looking for or interested in.

In a previous post we list the best free tools to get keyword suggestions from Google and in this post we take a look at some of the free tools that you can use generate keyword suggestions and long tail keyword ideas from Youtube.

1. SeoStack Chrome extension

The SeoStack chrome extension is a free extension for Google Chrome browser. It can generate keyword ideas from Google and Youtube.

Get keywords from youtube using seostack chrome extension

Install SeoStack Chrome Extension

The seed keyword is modified by adding letters a-z and numbers 0-9 and then keyword suggestions are fetched from the search engine.

Simply put the seed keyword in the left box and select the source engine and click start. SeoStack supports specifying multiple seed keywords at once.

It also supports specifying wildcard at different positions. For example ‘* iphone’ can be specified as the seed keyword and then the modifier letters would be placed in the wildcard position like this –

a iphone
b iphone

Using different combinations and keyword patterns the tool can be used to generate a large set of keyword ideas which would be long tail and topic based.

SeoStack allows you to select different countries and languages to generate keyword ideas specific to that country or language. But it may not work very accurately since Google is slowly ignoring country and language hints in search queries.

2. SeoChat Keyword Suggest Tool

The seochat keyword suggestion tool is a web based tool that fetches keyword ideas from multiple search engines which include Google, Bing, Youtube and Amazon.

Featurewise, its similar to SeoStack and does the job nicely.

3. Hypersuggest

Hypersuggest is another web based keyword suggestion tool, that generates keyword suggestions from Google and Youtube. It supports specifying different wildcard positions as well as question based modifies like why, when, how etc

It uses modifiers including letters, numbers and prepositions and can generate over 300 keywords per seed keyword

4. Soovle

Soovle is another web based keyword generation tool that supports lots of search engines including Google, Bing, Youtube, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, Answers.com, Wikipedia etc

However Soovle is limited in the number of keywords it generates. Soovle uses the seed keyword without any modifiers with each search engines and therefore generates a much smaller number of keywords per seed keyword.

It generates keyword as you type and is quite fast. It gives a quick overview of most popular keywords/topics around your main seed keyword.

Final thoughts

After generating the keyword suggestions the next step is to use the Google keyword planner to get search volume and cpc data.

The volume data would help you estimate which keywords have the maximum traffic potential and are in trend at the moment.

Keyword suggestions are a great way to find out what people are searching for and what they want. Building content around these keywords ensures that you are able to deliver to the exact demands of your audience and thereby build business with them.

But these are the not the only best tools to find the most profitable keywords in your niche or market.
Niche forums, question answer sites and social sites are a great place to discover keyword ideas and topics.

Problem with automated tools

There are lots of free and paid tools out there that allow you to extract keywords from search engine sources. Popular ones include keyword planner, ubersuggest etc.

However these tools are more like machine, they just retrieve the data from the search engine’s database. They are not inaccurate, but are very limited.

All it shows you is how many times a word or certain phrase has been searched. Sure, that gives you a good idea about what people are searching for, but that’s it.

To be a successful marketer, you have to look closely to what your audience is thinking and talking about. The more you engage with your audience the more you understand their needs and eventually you find more ways to approach them. That is how a successful business goes on.

A nice place to find this information is social sites like forums, where people interact and speak out their minds.

Keyword research using tools :

Find keywords -> Check traffic potential -> Convert to topics -> Write content

Keyword research on Forums

Find popular topics -> Steal both topic and content 😀

Step 1 – Find forums in your niche/market

The first step is to find the best forum sites in your niche. With google, it takes not more than a few queries to do so. Search up for something like

“niche” forums
gardening forums
cooking forums

The results would contain forum sites. Check every individual site that comes up in the results. Get inside the site and see the categories, sub categories. Find the one that is most relevant to the topic or micro-niche you wish to target.

Step 2 – Find popular high traffic posts

Most forum sites list out discussions (also called threads) in table and columns. There is often a column that shows the number of views and number of replies.

Find discussions/topics that have high number of views and replies. Take a look at these topics. Try to figure out if these topics are useful enough to write a blog post.

These topics have most likely received a lot of traffic, and some of it might have been organic. So if you target these topics, you can receive a lot of traffic too. There is no guarantee about it, you have to try and see for yourself. But it often works.

Step 3 – Get the keywords behind those popular forum topics

This neat trick will get you some bright keyword ideas behind those popular forum topics that you discovered in the previous step. It is not a very difficult thing to do.

Open up Google keyword planner, and put in the url of the popular discussion into it. and click ‘Get ideas’.

Keyword Planner would now retrieve some very related keywords for that particular url. Download the csv file and go ahead with your analysis.

The idea behind this approach is to hunt for other potential high traffic keywords that might be related to this topic and provide us with more unique content opportunities.

And very often the keywords returned are long tail, have good traffic and are provide lots of different and unique content ideas.

Conclusion

On forums, people talk about all sorts of things about a subject or product and therefore you have the opportunity to better understand what exactly they are looking for, what problems are they facing and what are they trying to do.

Use this knowledge to develop content and meet their demands. Simply put, you just need take a look at what topics are people talking about a lot. These are popular topics and you can develop content around these to boost traffic on your site.

Later on you might be surprised to discover that some of the highest traffic posts on your site were written around topics you found on forums.