Getting proper keywords is the key element in having a very successful niche site.
But if all webmasters use Google Keyword Planner to get keywords, don’t we end up targeting the same small amount of people?
The answer is Yes.
The solution is to use some innovative ideas in correlation with Keyword Research Tools to give ourselves the best advantage possible. There are a lot of keywords out there that are not tapped into their full potential, so let’s explore all the ways we have to do it.
The majority of marketers and SEO experts use the same tools to scan for keywords. And while they are good in their own terms and it helps you discover niches on broader subjects, it creates a lot of competition on a limited amount of keywords.
This makes it harder to rank for those keywords, and it also leaves a lot of untapped possibilities.
To get over this problem, we’ll use 5 different innovative ways to scan for keyword ideas in a totally new method, that will allow finding clients in a way that basic Keywords Research Tools can’t.
Table of Contents
1. Become your customers
When we think about keywords that people will use to find things, we tend to get way too technical and focus on SEO specific keywords. But if we think about it, in real-life situations people might search differently than most of us think.
For example, most flower shops will focus on keywords like “best flowers to buy” or “flower delivery New York”, yet people don’t use only those rigid keywords when they are looking to buy flowers. People’s searches are much more personal than that.
There are a lot of customers that will search for things like “what flower is best to say I love you” or “should I bring flowers to the second date”. People’s searches are usually much more focused around their problems, instead of being focused on the solution.
Another example would be for solutions that people don’t even know they exist. Some people might not know the fact that there are alarms for your pools to keep their children safe. But they can be targeted with keywords like “best ways to keep your kids safe near a pool” or “stopping pool drowning”.
It’s easy to get stuck on technical terms and SEO, but the customers that we want to target are humans, and they think and search for things in another way.
All you have to do is take a piece of paper and start imagining that you’re your customer and that you know nothing about your product. Now write down:
How you would search for it?
How would you talk to your friends about it?
How you would describe the problem?
Why would you need the product that you want to promote?
What problem does it solve and how good is at solving it?
You can present products that offer a good night sleep to people that have troubles sleeping, as another example. So instead of targeting keywords like “best eye mask for sleep”, you will focus on keywords like “how to get a good night sleep”, “best products for sleeping well” or “I want to sleep better”.
You can get a lot of ideas of keywords this way, and you can perform research on these keywords later and see which one has the best potential. The idea is to get out of the box of Keyword Research Tools and expand into the mind of your clients.
That’s why I advise focussing on niches that you like or use as well. That would make it much easier to get into the customer’ shoes.
If you can think like a customer and understand their needs, you can better target them.
After all, the search engines are designed to provide the best solution to the customer. Even Google focuses nowadays to offer a solution to the problems, by understanding what the customers are writing in search, instead of just providing results to the inquiries.
2. Get customers feedback
Again, this is something that often gets overlooked when building a niche site. We tend to become so focused on tools and words, and we forget that the traffic we want to attract is human.
All people have needs when it comes to certain products and niches, and they even have preferences about how things are displayed on a website. There are a lot of ways to get their feedback, both directly and indirectly.
Direct ways to gather feedback is to go asking them. That could be on Forums, Facebook groups or even sites like Quora or Reddit. Find where your potential visitors hang out and go talk with them.
You will get keyword ideas like you never could have imagined by yourself. You’ll also get valuable feedback about what they need to find when they are searching for that product or service.
To get indirect feedback, you simply have to take note of all the keywords that people use to land on your website. Again, you will find ideas of keywords that you never thought about, and you can refocus your content on those specific keywords afterward.
While the keywords you get from this idea are not the most popular in terms of searches per month, they still hold great value when we take into consideration all the variations of phrases that come from them.
By ranking one of these keywords you’ll actually rank for a lot of phrases that go along with it.
3. Research user-generated content and online communities
What is great about places like forums, community groups, and sites like Reddit, Quora, and Yahoo Answers is the fact that you can find a lot of user-generated content.
People create topics or address questions exactly how they would naturally do it on Google search. This is a great way to find a lot of new keywords that you never thought about.
Let’s say that we take a look into the SEO category on the WarriorForum. This is a screenshot with topics found on 23rd March 2019. Let’s take a look.
At first glance, we can get some keyword ideas about the SEO niche that are super awesome. “How to rank youtube videos”, “traffic from irrelevant keywords”, “website ranking advice”, “SEO trends and techniques in 2020”, “link building mistakes”, “local SEO rank trackers” and “how to improve search rankings” are just some examples we can pick at ease.
As you can see, we can easily find sub-niches of SEO that are pretty interesting and that have people interested in them.
Another great example of user-generated content is using Google related search. Let’s say that we are looking for “increasing website ranking”, which is a big niche to follow.
Related searches from Google gives us good ideas of sub-niches and keywords that we can target, like “how to rank in Google”, “increase website traffic free” or “get traffic for website”.
These are some basic examples of how user-generated content can help you. Of course, different niches have a different platform where they prefer to hang out.
Getting in all these places and seeing how people talk about that particular niche and the problems they have is a great way to find new ideas for keywords.
4. Research social media platforms
When it comes to social media, people post there without a filter, therefore you find subjects and questions addressed exactly how they do it in real life.
Depending on your niche, you can find great ideas on Facebook groups, Linkedin posts, Pinterest and so on. Even a quick scan through some Facebook groups that aren’t filled with spam will give you a lot of new idea about what people are looking for in that niche.
Linkedin is useful if you target businesses, while Facebook is great at researching for average consumers. Twitter might sound like a good idea in plain sight, but most of the keywords and hashtags are filled with spam, so it’s not a very useful platform to research for keywords.
Pinterest and Instagram are great for niches that are more visual and trendy, as these platforms focus a lot on pictures. Still, there are great ways to find ideas here, as people post images, infographics, products, and opinions about everything you can think of.
5. Use all the keywords you gathered and expand them with Keyword Suggest
By now you should have a lot of great keywords to work from. If you want to expand your list, even more, take your list of keywords and insert it into the Keyword Suggest tool from Google.
Google will use your keywords as a base to give you a whole bunch of other keywords that people use when they search for those things.
You can sort them by popularity and you can find those that have very low competition, because you have a better shot at ranking them.
Using this method, combined with all the creative ways we used before to get the keywords, will give you an abundance of keywords to choose from. You’ll not miss any valuable phrases that usually gets left out by only doing basic keyword research.
You used a creative way to get keywords, based on what you think customers will look for online when searching for that product or service.
You used multiple real ways to get keywords, by getting feedback and researching user-generated content, communities and social media platforms.
And now you got an expansion based on the huge database of Google, that will use real data from trillions of searches that are done every year.
It doesn't get any better than this!
Conclusion
We have a lot of creative ways to come up with keywords that we can use for our niche sites. It’s not enough to use free keyword research tools, because those will give only the results that everyone got them and overused them.
Those basic keywords are used by a lot of niche sites and don’t serve the full range of search queries that usually happen for that specific niche.
By stepping into the shoes of the client and trying to realize how they would search for that potential products is a great start to get a whole range of new keywords. Combine this with researching the user-generated content, social media platforms, and online communities, and you have the widest range of keywords possible.
After we have done all the research and creative writing, then we use the Keyword Research tool to use Google to generate even more keywords based on the ones we got.
Even if those that we get in the first steps aren’t the most popular, there is a lot of potential to getting traffic from them when we take into account the full range of phrases that people use in combination with that one.
After all, your website will not rank just for those keywords and that is not the only traffic that you get. Still, by using clever keywords that other webmasters don’t use but customers are using to search, you have a better shot at being in the top ranks for very profitable words.
The secret to keyword success is to get outside of the box and find ways that normally, people don’t use to find keywords. Understanding your customers has always been one of the most successful strategies for businesses, regardless of the niche.
Use all the five steps I described here and you’re guaranteed to find awesome keywords that will boost your niche site into the top ranks of very lucrative search engine queries.
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