How do you go from 1 keyword and find another 10.000 that might also be relevant to your business/site. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about and worked on for some sites recently. It’s fun as with smaller sites it makes it easy to get more insights into what an estimated size can be of an industry/niche that a company operates in. This ain’t rocket science and hopefully, after this blog posts, you’ll get some new ideas on how to deal with this.
How to get started?
Pick 1 keyword, preferably short-head: coffee mug, black rug, Tesla Roadster. They’re keywords that can create a good start for your keyword research as they’re more generic. In the research itself, we’ll talk about ways to get more insights into the long tail based on this 1 keyword.
From 1 to 10.000
Start finding related keywords for the keyword(s) you picked that you consider relevant. Use the tools that we’re going to talk about after this and repeat the process for all the keywords that you get back after the first run: 1 = 100 results = 10.000 results. Depending on the industry/niche that you operate in you might be able to find even more keywords using this method. When I started doing research for a coffee brand within 30 mins I ended up with data for 3 big niches within that space and over 25k keywords.
What tools are out there?
Obviously, you can’t do this without any tools. For my own research, I use the tools that are listed beneath. They’re a mix of different tools but they have the same output eventually. Getting to know more keywords but at the same time also get different input on intent. Focused on search (I’m looking for.. {topic_name}) and other search intent (I have a question around {topic_name}).
Besides the tools that I’ve listed there are many more that you could be using that I want you to benefit from:
- Google Adwords Keyword Tool: The best source for related keywords by a keyword.
- SEMRush: The second best source likely as they’re using all sorts of ways to figure out what keywords are related to each other. Also a big database of keywords.
- AnswerThePublic: Depending on why/what/where/who you’re looking for AnswersThePublic can help you find keywords that are related to a user question.
Suggested Searches:
- Google, Bing, Yahoo: The biggest search engines in the world are all using different ways to calculate related searches through their suggestions. So they’re all worth looking into.
- Google Trends: Is a keyword trending or not and what keywords are related to a trending topic. Mostly useful when you’re going after topics that might have (had) some popularity.
- YouTube: Everything video related, need I say more.
- Wikipedia: You really are looking for some in-depth information in the topic, Wikipedia can likely tell you more about the topic and the related topics that are out there.
- Instagram: Everything related to pictures and keywords, their hashtags might mislead you from time to time.
- Reddit: The weirdest place to find keywords and topics.
- Quora: Users have questions, you can answer them. The most popular questions on Quora on a topic are usually the biggest questions on your customer’s minds too.
- Yahoo Answers: Depending on the keyword the data can be a bit old, who still uses Yahoo? But it can be useful to get the real hardcore keywords with a question intent.
- Synonyms: The easiest relevance, find the keywords that have the same intention.
- Amazon: Find keywords that people are using in a more transactional intent and that you might search for when you’re looking for a product. Great for e-commerce.
Grouping Keywords
When you’ve found your related keyword data set it’s time for the second phase, grouping them together. In the end, 1 keyword never comes alone and there is a ton you can do with them if you group them together in a way that makes sense for you….
By name/relevance/topical: Doing this at scale is hard, but I’m pretty sure that you see the similarity between the keywords: coffee mug and: black coffee mug. In both ‘coffee mug’ is the keyword that is overlapping (bigram). If you start splitting up keywords with different words relatively fast you’re able to find the top words and word combinations that your audience is using most. If you’re wanting to find out more on how to group them, check out KeywordClarity.io where you can group keywords together based on word groupings.
By keyword volume: If you have the right setup you can retrieve the keyword volumes for all of these keywords and start bucketing the keywords together based on short-head and the long tail. This will enable you to get better insights into the total size of the volume in your industry/niche.
By ranking/ aka opportunity: It would be great if you can combine your keywords with data from rankings. So you know what opportunity is and for what words you’re still missing out on some additional search volume.
What’s next?
Did you read the last part? What if you would start combining all three ways of grouping them? In that case, you’ll get more insights into the opportunity, your current position in the group and what kind of topical content you should be serving your audience. Food for thought for future blog posts around this topic.