What do you want to accomplish?
Build your keyword list: add relevant and high-quality keywords to your keyword list.
Why
Creating & maintaining a keyword list is an essential part of any content marketing strategy.
You can grow your keyword list is two directions:
- A: Add more quality keywords to your list
- B: Add quantitative data to your keywords
This hack will focus on developing our keyword list vertically: adding more relevant keywords.
Procedure
Every site owner wants to drive more traffic from Google to his/her own website. And we all know that targeting the right keywords is essential, so we need to invest time in keyword research. But very often, what is working is hidden in plain sight on Google itself.
This is exactly what we’re going to show in this hack.
Google Search Suggestions
Let’s start by opening a browser on ‘google.com’:
In this section, we will use the autocomplete suggestions to find more keywords.
Basic Suggestions
We start by entering our seed idea keywords in the Google search input box. Since we’re researching our wine business, we enter the word ‘wine’:
The important part is that you don’t press the Enter button after entering your keyword; instead, you will investigate the autocomplete suggestions Google is showing in the dropdown.
It is essential to realize that Google is showing these suggestions because these are the most frequently used phrases that people use on Google related to your keyword.
Not every suggestion will be relevant to you. For instance: ‘Wine Dierickx’ appears to be an actress, which is irrelevant for our business. Other suggestions will be specific to your location, such as ‘wine bar gent.’ Depending on the type of business (online/offline), these localities can be less or more relevant.
Now you need to add all relevant keywords to your keyword list:
- wine searcher
- wine rack
- wine cooler
Alphabetic Variations
You can use a variation on the previous method to get more keyword ideas. Just go through the alphabet and append each letter to your master keyword. You will be surprised to find phrases that you could never come up with yourself. So you will get the suggestions for:
- wine a
- wine b
- wine c
- …
These are the suggestions for ‘wine a’:
So, after a careful review we can add more keywords to our list:
- wine app
- wine advent calendar
- …
You repeat this for each letter of the alphabet until you reach the ‘z’:
Prepositions
You can prefix or suffix your keyword with other words such as: is, why, what, …
And again, you add the most interesting phrases to your keyword list.
Google Search Results
In the previous section we used Google Search without pressing the enter button since we were only interested in the auto-complete suggestions.
In the section we will press the enter button to see the actual search results.
To illustrate the versatility of the search results we’ll do a quick search on ‘taste wine’. You will see a screen like:
We are all familiar with this kind of search results. But if we take a bird’s eye view on these results, then we see:
So, the search results contain different sections:
- Ads: the advertisement section, companies that pay Google to show their ads when certain keywords are entered.
- Organic Search Results: the best (non-paying) content for the search; this is the place we all aim for.
- Videos: videos related to your search
- People also ask
- Searches related to
Videos
Video is becoming more and more popular. And YouTube is also very tightly integrated with Google Search since both belong to the same company.
Have a good look at the videos’ titles and put the most interesting phrases or keywords on your own list.
People also ask
This is an essential section, especially for keyword research, because here, you see exactly what questions people are asking most often related to your keywords. Update your keyword list with these questions.
Many of them are even candidates for separate posts on our website.
Searches related to
Very often there’s a section at the bottom called: Searches related to ‘your keyword”.
When people reach the bottom of the page, they probably didn’t find what they were looking for. Then there are two options: or they go to the next page or follow one of the links in ‘Searches related to …’ because Google learned that these were the most frequently used next searches.
When doing keyword research, you should take note of these suggested phrases.
Summary
Google search reveals a lot of valuable information for building your keyword list. Google wants to help every internet user as well as it can, thereby revealing a lot of valuable information to the trained eyes among us.
We illustrated how you can extract keywords:
- by using the auto complete suggestions
- by carefully reviewing the search results screen