Hey everybody! Welcome back to another video where we're going to be discussing keyword research again. If you saw our last video, you know that we kicked off keyword research process with a tool called the Google Keyword Planner.
Using that tool we began to compile a list of keywords related to the subject that we wanted to start creating our content around, and then we put those keywords into different buckets based on similar themes or topics. So now that we've got a decent list of what I would call 'root keywords', we want to dig a little deeper into the longtail of the keywords and find more specific phrases that people are actually searching for.
So there are a couple of tools that I want to talk about that are going to help us find those longer tail keyword phrases, and the first one is Google Suggest. If you've been using Google for any length of time, you're probably familiar with this tool even though you might not have known what it's called.
If you go to Google and you start typing in your search phrase, for us we're going to type in content marketing, you're going to see that Google's going to start giving you suggestions to help make your search faster and more convenient. So if we started typing in content marketing into the search box we would get suggestions like ‘content marketing institute’, ‘content marketing strategy’, ‘content marketing world’, ‘content marketing Atlanta’. And if you start adding the different letters of the alphabet after your root keyword phrase, you're going to get a different set of suggestions.
So if we started typing in ‘content marketing a’, we would get suggestions like ‘content marketing Atlanta’, ‘content marketing agency’, ‘content marketing awards’, ‘content marketing association’. Same if you add any of the different letters of the alphabet.
You want to start adding all of these suggested keywords to your master list. And the great thing about these keyword suggestions is that:
- They're long-tail phrases, which means they're not quite as competitive as those short, broad keyword phrases that we got from our Google Keyword Planner, so that makes them a little easier to rank for.
- These keyword phrases are much more specific in nature, so the searcher that's looking for these phrases knows exactly what kind of information they want, and if you can give that to them, you instantly become a pretty valuable resource to that searcher.
- These keyword phrases are coming directly from Google, so you know that people are actively searching for these phrases, even though these longer tail phrases might not have a lot of search volume when you do a little bit further analysis. But you know that people are actively out there searching for them because they wouldn't be coming from the Search Suggestion Tool if that was not the case.
So, that's how you use the Google Suggestion Tool to grow your initial keyword list. I also want to talk about a couple of other ways we can use Google Search Results to find even more keywords for your list.
If we typed in content marketing and did a search, if you scroll to the bottom of the page you're going to see a section called, ‘Searches related to content marketing’. And so this section is going to give you a lot of other great long tail keyword phrases. So take a look at these related phrases for your root phrases, and all of the suggestion keyword phrases that you got from the first part of this video, and then keep growing your list until you start seeing a lot of redundancy, and once they start getting redundant you've probably gotten all the good data that you're going to get from the related searches.
Another way to use Google Search Results to find more keywords by looking at the ads and the organic results that come back. So if I were going to do this for the content marketing search that I just performed, I might find phrases like, ‘improved content marketing’, ‘better content marketing’, ‘learn content marketing’, ‘content marketing news’, ‘content marketing research’, ‘content marketing strategy’, ‘content marketing education’. You can start to build a big, solid list from doing some of these searches.
You can also look at the different forms of media to see what other keywords might pop out at you, so from the Google Search Results you can look at the news tab, you can look at videos, and each one of these tabs is probably going to give you even more ideas for your keyword list.
When you add all of these keywords to your list, you want to put them in the second column under the keyword column, and then you want to put them into the appropriate topic buckets by putting the name of the bucket in the first column under ad group. So for a keyword phrase like ‘improved content marketing’, that would go into the ‘content marketing results’ bucket.
Then for ‘content marketing education’ it might be ‘content marketing training’, ‘learn content marketing’ again, ‘content marketing training’. So this way you're keeping all the keywords separated in your different themes so you can add them to your keyword tracking tool later on, and separate them into your different buckets.
So that's how to use Google Suggest, Google Related Searches, and the search results to grow your initial keyword list. In the next video I'm going to show an awesome tool that's going to do a lot of this stuff for you automatically, which is going to save you a ton of time, so check out that next video, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time. Cheers!
