8 Hidden Sources For Finding The Best Keywords For Your Business

Are you struggling to find the best keywords for your business?

How are you supposed to know which keywords are the best ones to target, when there is so much conflicting information online.

As you probably already know, targeting the wrong keywords can cost your business time and money.

While having the right one could generate an instant boost for your site traffic, resulting in more leads, enquiries and sales.

Google remains to be the number one go-to search engine for most people.

People in the SEO industry focus on a lot on things like signals, new Google updates, mobile responsiveness and many other factors, then they ignore a lot of the basics like keyword research.

If you’re still new to keyword research thing, read this guide first to give you an overview of Google’s Keyword Planner tool.

After you do your research on GKP tool, continue reading this post to discover 8 more “not commonly talked about” tools to find better keywords, and discover the factors that determine which keywords to go after.

Are you ready?

How To Find The Best Keywords For Your Business

Which Keywords to choose?

So, you found a lot of great keywords, the question now is which keywords should you go after?

Of course, some keywords will be harder to rank for and others will be easier. Some keywords could generate you more revenue even with less traffic.

So how can you determine the best keywords to go after?

There are 2 factors you should take into consideration when you’re deciding which keywords will be the best to use for your business.

• Commercial Intent

• Competition

Commercial Intent

Keywords are generally classified into 2 types; informational and commercial keywords.

Informational keywords are keywords people search for to learn more about a given topic, or to search for a quick solution to their problem.

They’re just searching about something to gather information, like “what is web hosting?”.

That doesn’t mean you’re ready to choose a hosting provider today and make a purchase.

On the other hand, commercial keywords are keywords prospects use, when they have an intent to buy a product. For example, “best web hosting company”, “content marketing services” or “best premium digital marketing courses” etc.

This isn’t a science that I can’t teach you, but when you’re in the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll notice a great difference between the bid value of commercial keywords and informational keywords.

You could also apply the old copywriting AIDA formula here.

Here’s what I mean:

• Attention: These are informational keywords most of the time. Good for generating traffic and letting people know about you and your company.

• Interest: When people start to have interest in a topic, they’ll start looking for comparison, and see which service to go after and so on.

• Desire: After they decide on the service to use, they’ll have the desire to go with that service. They may start looking for coupons, final reviews to make sure that they chose the right product.

• Action: After they have the desire, they’ll start taking action. They’ll start searching for how to buy the product and so on.

You don’t need to always go with action keywords, but whenever you can, it’s better.

Keyword Competition:

After you’ve found a great commercially intent keyword, you now should analyse the competition on the first page of Google’s SERPs.

The less competitive a keyword is, the easier it will be to rank for.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on what to do:

1. Go to MozBar tool page and click on the browser you use.

2. After that enter your search in Google.

3. Check the PA (Page Authority) of the page, the higher the number, the harder it’ll be to beat that page.

4. After that check DA (Domain Authority), same as above.

5. Click on link analysis, and observe the links that point to this site.

6. After 20-30 seconds you could easily determine whether the site uses blackhat strategies or not. This means the page won’t last there forever.

7. Check the titles of the results on the first page, and ask yourself, are they optimised for that keyword? Do they have keywords at the beginning or at the end of the title?

8. After that open this page result, click on the magnifying glass icon in the mozbar and choose page elements. You’ll find information about the page’s URL H tags and image alt text.

9. If the keyword is included in the URL, H1/H2 tag, and image alt text, then consider this page a well-optimised page. If not, this page could be easy to beat.

10. After that, check the quality of the content. If it’s a long informative post that cites research and educational institutions, it’ll be hard to beat this page.

11. Most easy targets are pages with a PA less than 10, such as; Ehow articles, Ezine articles, Ebay, wordpress.com or blogspot pages. This is a sign that you should target this keyword.

To summarize, if you want know how competitive a keyword is, check the following:

• Page authority

• Domain Authority

• Number of links and link profile.

• On-page optimisation.

If you find sites that you could easily knock down, go after that keyword.

It’s not easy to find the right keyword from the first time, but you’ll get better at it.

You could also have some help.

Let’s start with this Google tool.

1. Google Correlate – The Little Known Gold Gem by Google

Wondering what this tool is?

It’s Google Correlate.

The difference between this tool and Google Keyword Planner is that GKP finds closely related terms, while Google Correlate finds keywords that “correlates” with your seed keyword.

Here’s how to use this tool:

1. Go to Google Correlate

2. Type your keyword and click search correlations

3. Click on the show more button to get more keywords.

Here are the results for “WordPress”

The closer the keyword number is to 1.0, the more often it’s searched for besides the main keyword.

You could now use some of these results as seed keywords in Google Keyword Planner or in other tools as I’ll show you in this post.

2. Google Trends for SEO Campaigns

Here is another Keyword Research tool from Google.

Google Trends is one of my favourite tools. I always check my keyword there before I finally go with it.

It helps you to see how popular your keyword is over a certain period of time. This could save you great amounts of time when trying to rank for keywords with little/no interest.

And the best part, after you search for your keyword, scroll down to the bottom and check related keywords.

Sometimes, you can’t find these great keywords in Google Keyword Planner.

Here is how to use this tool:

1. Head over to Google Trends.

2. Type your keyword at the top and click on the search button.

3. Check the results and check other keywords at the bottom of the page.

Here is an example for Content Marketing:

 

3. Use KeywordTool.io to Gather Google suggestions

Many people who want to learn how to find the best keywords for their business or website, fail to notice that the best keywords are sitting right under their noses.

Google gives you these keyword ideas whilst you’re typing in a search query.

Would you like a tool that gathers these keywords for you?

I got you covered.

KeywordTool.io is a great tool that helps you generate long tail keyword suggestions from Google without you trying to type every letter after/before your keyword.

It’s similar to UberSuggest, but it adds letters before and after your keyword, while UberSuggest adds characters after your keyword only.

Here’s how to use this tool:

1. Go to keywordtool.io and enter a seed keyword.

2. Wait for a few seconds and let the tool do the work.

3. Redo this search for other sites like Youtube, Bing and App Store. This will help you to find better ideas.

Note: you could subscribe to the pro version, if you want to check the data right in it, or you could add them in the Google Keyword Planner.

4. MetaGlossary to search for keywords by definition

Here’s another great tool you could use for keyword research. MetaGlossary.com is a site that searches for definitions.

The beauty of this tool is the related terms that comes with the definition. They’re enough to keep you busy.

Here are the instructions from the site itself:

You should try it out.

Wikipedia can also be used as a keyword research tool

Yes, Wikipedia could be used to find more hidden keywords. Wikipedia is the sixth most popular site in the world.

They rank on the top 3 results of Google SERPs for almost anything, and they got there without relying on paid advertising.

Want to know their strategy? Content marketing and SEO (learn more about SEO here).

They get all their traffic from Google.

You should find out the keywords they use and try to come up with long-tail variations.

Here is exactly what to do:

1. Google your topic. Most of the time you’ll find Wikipedia is the first result. If not, add the search parameter “inurl:Wikipedia” next to your keyword.

2. Open the Wikipedia site and identify keywords you could use, and try to come up with long-tail variations.

3. Table of contents is also a good source to find more keywords.

Now, you know the keywords that have made Wikipedia popular!

5-8. Paid Keyword Research tools to check

If you’re serious about growing your business, which you should be, you’ll need to invest in keyword research tools to find the best keywords your target customers use to find businesses just like yours.

Yes, you could go check the competition on the Google Keyword Planner, search for each keyword on Google, open each site, check on-page optimisation and so on, and it’ll take you forever.

But you run a business, save yourself some time and let a premium keyword tool do all the heavy lifting for you.

Here are a few keyword research tools you could check. You’ll find the benefits of each, when to use each, and the one I really prefer.

So here we go:

• SEMRUSh: This tool will help you generate a fresh list of keywords that’s hard to find on the Google Keyword Planner.

• Moz’s Keyword Analysis tool: This tool helps you with the analysis part of keyword competition, but it won’t help you find new keywords.

• SECockpit: This tool is targeted for SEO professionals, people who are into this forever. It won’t be a good choice until you spend some time with other tools first.

• Long Tail Pro (my best choice): If you’re looking for a tool that could help you with finding a lot of fresh hidden keywords + help you with analyzing the competition, and one with easy interface, then you should grab this tool at all cost. The best part is that it won’t cost you a fortune as other tools.

The Truth About SEO

SEO is 90% about choosing the right keywords for your business. We’ve written a blog about the best SEO strategies for small businesses here.

If you find the right keywords, you’re ahead of 90% of your competitors. With on-page optimisation and a link building strategy (learn more about link building here), you could easily outrank the rest.

Now, you know what it takes to find a lot of keywords. You know the factors that determine which keywords you should go after. You also know the tools that could help you with this process and make it much easier for you.

So what are you waiting for? The world is waiting to discover your business.

So take action and make it a habit.