How to Keyword Research and Find Amazing Ideas for Untapped Content

Knowing how to keyword research is your first step at driving targeted traffic to your website

A keyword is what helps search engines determine what your website and webpage are talking about, so they can accurately provide that information to the people seeking it out. Any time you type something into Google, that is a keyword. Knowing how to drive traffic to your site using keywords is extremely important if you’re wanting people to see your website within Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any search engine.

If you want a keyword to target a potential customer, it helps to understand the buying process. Check out this tutorial on the customer purchasing life-cycle. Having insight into how people buy is crucial to understanding how to effectively target your customers at the right phase.

Consider this example-

People typing a keyword like “bird watching” into Google probably aren’t looking to buy something, in fact, you really don’t know much about what they’re looking for. There’s a lot of things that could be going through their head at that point, but you certainly can’t read their mind. It’s simply just not a very targeted keyword.

If you’ve ever typed anything into Google, you probably have noticed the instant feature.

This information can be quite useful to internet marketers. It tells you common things people have entered into Google recently–these are topics and questions people are actively inquiring about!

How to use Google instant to come up with hundreds of keyword ideas

If you ever get stuck thinking of keywords, Google instant is great for throwing out ideas.

Let’s take the phrase “bird watching” from earlier, and add an “a” afterwords:

Bird watching activities for kids, there’s a keyword for you. Let’s try it again with the letter “b”

Lots of great new keyword ideas here!

Let’s do this same method, but try putting the “b” in front of bird watching:

Look, “best binoculars for bird watching” and “best bird watching books” are great keyword ideas to target for potential customers. Obviously, they’re looking for those things, and they’re doing their research! People usually research before they buy. Your job is to convince them to buy the best binoculars, or the best bird watching book!

Try that technique–go all through the alphabet, you’ll be amazed at how many ideas you can generate that way. Write them down!

Keep in mind, when trying to target a customer within the buying phase, consider incorporating terms such as:

• review
• where to buy/find
• scam
• legit
• best

People using such terms within their keyword are much farther along in the customer purchase life-cycle, and more likely to be ready to buy a product.

 Ubersuggest can give you lots of ideas too!

 

You can also try going to ubersuggest.org, simply type in a phrase and it’ll suggest hundreds of ideas based on what people are searching for within Google!

Gathering keyword ideas is only the first step, you need to use a reliable keyword tool for additional data!

So now that you have a list of possible keyword ideas, you’re going to need to do further research. Initially you’re going to want to check how often the keyword gets searched. If it receives 3 searches per month, maybe you shouldn’t put your effort into writing around it. But secondly, (and most importantly) you want to know your competition! This is going to be the key to telling if you’ve found a good keyword.

Now, you can find the competition manually within Google, but it’s a pain and takes WAY TOO LONG! Let me show you what I mean:

You can find the true competition for any key phrase by doing a search result in quotes. Here I put “best binoculars for bird watching” in Google, but this initial number of results is A LIE!

It’s telling me there are 157,000 competing pages! But I’m going to have to click to the LAST page of search results, here I found it on page 12.

Now it’s saying 112 results. That’s actually the TRUE competition. Obviously you don’t want to sit around forever clicking through to the last page of results…that could take forever!

Let’s put “best binoculars for bird watching” into a keyword tool:

I’m putting this into Jaaxy to give me the information I’m looking for. It’ll do this pretty much instantly without all the manual labor I had to go through before. I don’t want to go into information overload here, so if you want to know more about how awesome the Jaaxy keyword research tool is, I suggest you read my full review.

Now I can immediately tell the keyword’s competition by the QSR (quoted search result), without scrolling forever through Google. It’s showing 110.  (While I found 112 doing it manually, Jaaxy takes data from several sources (not just Google) causing the variation, but overall the number is VERY close.)

In addition, it lets me view the number of monthly searches- 2,628. That’s actually really quite high (you want to aim at least 100 monthly searches). And with a QSR of only 110, this is a GREAT keyword. (You want the QSR to be at least below 400, preferably 300). Notice too, Jaaxy is providing LOTS of similar keyword suggestions, (I cropped the screen, there were way more!) so you can instantly see similar keywords and pick the best ones! It saves so much time.

Obviously, the lower competition (QSR), the better. If something only has 1 competing page within Google (or better yet, NO competing pages), your chances for landing on the first page are very, very high.

So keep these tips in mind when choosing your keywords:

• use Google instant, or ubersuggest to find keyword ideas when you are stuck
• try to target key phrases longer than 2 words
• use a keyword tool such as Jaaxy
• look for monthly searches of a least 100
• find competition ideally lower than 300 (but not more than 400)
• Make sure it makes sense to a human!

You don’t always have to write articles on specific keywords

While having targeted keywords is extremely important in terms of SEO and driving traffic, not all the content on your website has to be written specifically on a keyword, or a “good” keyword. It’s important to write just for content too. Ultimately it will rank in some way or another if it’s of decent quality.

You see, what ends up happening after you’ve written a lot of content for your website is your website will start ranking for all types of keywords you weren’t even aiming for.

Look at the data for one of my niche websites, these are the keywords it ranked for in the past month:

I’m viewing this data within my Google Webmaster Tools account. If you have a website, you need to hook it up to Google Web Tools– it’s free, can help your website rank better, and provides you with valuable insight about how people are actually finding your website.

Now, I don’t have 1,752 articles on my website, and I didn’t go out to specifically target all these keywords. And not all 1,752 of these keywords are ranking on the first page (however, several hundred of them are!) This is the result of having many pages of useful content on my website. It just happens naturally.

You want a lot of pages of content on your site, that will lead to your site ranking for LOTS of keywords. That is what is going to drive TONS of traffic to your site. Essentially, when you know the proper keyword research techniques, you’ll be able to drive lots of potential customers to your website, for free, without paying for any ads!

 

If you have anything to add, or questions to ask, leave me a comment down below!

-Wendy