13. How to Find Your Keywords and Phrases

Welcome to Day 13 of the 30 Day On-Site SEO Challenge. Today we’re going to be looking at how to find your keywords and phrases for your posts and website.

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How to Find Your Keywords and Phrases

There are many ways to find keywords and suitable phrases. The very first place to start is to think about what your audience would ask. Write down the words that you believe they would search for. Using these ‘seed’ words you can discover more keywords and phrases to use on your website and content. They may be accurate, or they may not, but whatever the case, they give you a place to get started.

Below I’ve added several more ways that you can find keywords and phrases.

Your Competition

A shortcut to finding good keywords is to look at the website of your competition. Use the website ispionage to see which keywords your competition is using. It’s a good place to start, as their strategy is clearly working and you can use their keywords after they’ve already researched for you.

Recommended Searches

When you use Google for a search, you’ll see that there is also a list of recommended searches on the bottom of the page. Scroll down to see that information. Any of these searches might be a good option for you to use as a keyword. You can collect a lot of ideas with this.

Predictive Search

Most of the major search engines offer a predictive search when you start typing in your keyword. This gives you an idea of what other people have been searching for that is related and again is a good source of ideas.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a good source of more keywords. They will also provide you with information on how many people are searching for a phrase and how hard the competition is to rank for it.

RB Keyword Research WP Plugin

This plugin uses the functionality behind Google’s autocomplete or predictive search to give you ideas. If you upgrade, you can also gain access to the keywords of Bing and Yahoo! It’s not hard to use this plugin, and you can also copy and paste the answers you get for later reference.

Forums & Groups

Look at the questions asked inside forums and groups for another selection of ideas. When you come across a new question, type it into Google search for another set of ideas for keywords.

Questions in Email

If you already have customers, collect their questions as a source of keyword ideas. Start with the question they ask, add it to google search and check out which keyword ideas you get.

Keyword research doesn’t have to be difficult. If you already know who your audience is, what their challenges are and what your solutions are, then you’ve got at least twenty ideas to get started right there. By using these methods, you should be able to create a list of at least 100 keywords for use when creating content, services and products that give value to your target market.

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