10 methods of finding the best keyword variations for your service, product or niche

16/03/2020

Whether you are working on building an SEO strategy or you are just getting started on SEO, keywords will play an important part. Not sure how to find the best keywords for your service, product or niche and create content with them?

Here are 10 of the best methods to find the right keywords for your business:

Determining your Niche

A niche is a specific focus in a market, for example: women’s fitness clothing could be segmented by women’s yoga clothing, women’s running clothing and women’s weightlifting clothing etc. This can be focused even further when adding in factors such as plus sized clothing or even fitness clothing for the environmentally conscious.

This is the first step in finding your keywords as your niche determines the types of products you create, the services you offer and the target audience.

Brainstorm Seed keywords

A seed keyword is a base for any keyword research and starting any research without them can lead to missed opportunities or gaps in your market. So brainstorm and build a seed keyword list by thinking of:

  • words associated to your brand
  • Associations to your product and services
  • Descriptions of your audience
  • Words used by your audience

This will provide an excellent base to expand upon and cover all keywords related to your niche, products and services.

Use your Seed Keywords in Research Tools

There are so many keyword research tools out there, both paid and free, that can be used to find hundreds of keywords. Here are some examples:

  • Mangools KWFinder
  • Mom Keyword explorer
  • Ahrefs
  • Google Keyword Planner and Search Engine Console

These tools will help you generate long tail keywords from your seed words which are much more specific, focused and provides many different options per seed word.

Make use of Suggestions

In addition to free and paid keyword research tools, you can also use the suggestions provided by search engines including: Google, Pinterest and Amazon for eCommerce keywords. This method provides an insight into what is most queried and popular online. You can enter either seed words or long tail keywords for more specific searches:

  • google_predict

As you can see, these search engines provide plenty of ideas for long tail keywords and give you an excellent idea of what is most popular and therefore, may have a higher search volume.

Analyse Competitors Keywords

Keyword research tools are also able to analyse individual URLs and the keywords they rank for and their most popular pages. You can use this to your advantage and analyse the keywords used by your competitors and which are the most successful.

This indicates what your target audience finds most useful, as well as giving you opportunities to see their content. You could use this information to try making skyscraper content too and compete with this top content.

Keyword Difficulty

When keyword research tools generate results, many like KWFinder also analyse the keyword suggestions. This is very useful information as it will show search volume, trends and the keyword difficulty. This can be a deciding factor if you are going to use the keyword or continue to make it more specific.

The more competition in the keyword, the less likely you are the rank highly as your competitors will be more established there and there is a huge amount of results competition for the top stop. Therefore, you may be triggered to further your research and find long tail keywords with more potential for success.

LSI Keywords

In any content you will not just be using long tail keywords, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are also significant for SEO. LSI keywords are relevant words which tell search engines what your content is about.

An example on the topic of ‘Fitness Clothing’ could also include the keywords: breathable, stretch material, yoga leggings, form fitting and gym. This indicates that the content focuses on yoga clothing and provides context to the content.

You can read more on LSI Keywords in our SEO Guide.

Break Down Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are excellent for: titles, tags, meta descriptions, alt attributions and urls, however, if repeated in content can come across as keyword stuffing and not be readable for your audience. So, along with LSI keywords, you can break down long tail keywords and phrases into smaller pieces to be included within your content.

For example:                           Organic Earl Grey Tea Leaves

Breaks down into:

Organic Tea   –    Tea Leaves       –      Earl Grey Tea     –  Organic Earl Grey

These shorter phrases can be naturally injected into content and ensure your content is rich with keywords and not stuffed full of long, complicated keywords that do not work within the content.

Look at Trends

Trends are always a great place to look for keywords as it not only shows what people are interested in right now, but can open up options you may not have considered. Tools like Google Trends shows the most popular searches over certain periods of time and can be filtered by country and you can search topics.

Audience Queries

In a similar way to trending topics, seeking your audience in places such as forums hints at what your audience is searching for. This is a more targeted approach and you tackle current problems that your audience are having. Are you meeting their needs and have you thought of these keywords before? Additionally, you can analyse the terms and language that they use which can lead to more variations within keywords. For example, if you target women for the UK they will say ‘trousers’ whereas women in the US will use the term ‘Pants’.

Posted in Keywords