A lot of site owners and SEO’s are familiar with keyword research tools such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and the free tools from Yahoo and Google. These keyword tools are an excellent way to not only find keywords which are relevant to you products and the usage popularity of these terms, but you can also forecast a bit with expected traffic and conversions for PPC and maybe even SEO.
It is easy to become dependent on the same tools for similar projects however, and overlook the keyword research tools which exist in your own backyard.
Site Search Box : Most websites offer an internal search engine for searching the pages and content of the site. Some sites only receive a fraction of their traffic from search engines and other forms of web presence drive traffic; such as emails, ads, links, social media buzz ..etc. Once those users are brought to the site from a non-search property, which terms to they use to find the content which they are looking for on the site?
This valuable and private information can usually be found in your site’s log files, tracked by the internal search tool you use, or available via analytics.
Your Customer Service Department & Sales Team : Which people at the company spend the most time communicating with its customers? The customer service department and phones sales teams of course. If you’re lucky enough to have a call center at your fingertips, survey them with a mass form or set up one on one interviews to help identify some ofthe terms customers are using in natural conversation. In real estate, are they using neighborhood or subdivision? In Ohio, are they calling it soda or pop? Are they calling about tummy tucks, abdominoplasties or tummy lifts?
The call centers are a wealth of untapped content, use them wisely.
Television and News : Monitoring the terms used by talk show hosts, CNN and other entertainment outlets can identify some amazingly popular terms and help you get the jump on them. Current events can have a huge impact on search behavior; just imagine if Jennifer Anniston wears a dress from a brand new designer to the Oscars and it’s such a massive hit everyone is talking about it. Well if you sell that designer, you should be putting up a blog post or new page about it, linking from your homepage, putting out press releases, updating your PPC campaign before your competition does and hitting Facebook with Ads.
Hitting offline buzz during its transition to online can be massively successful, and cost efficient. If you can’t watch TV all day, check Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz on a regular basis to see if there are any peaks of interest in your market.
Social Media Buzz : Which relevant terms are people talking about in the world of social media? I really like Facebook Lexicon because it shows the popularity of terms as they are discussed on Facebook Walls between users. Since EVERYONE is jumping on Facebook now, this information is becoming more and more relevant to search marketing. Lexicon compares related terms and analyzes new popular trends, but you can not dig down into long tail terms as its dependent upon heavily discussed terms.
Twitter Search Trending Topics is also a good tool, like Yahoo Buzz or Google Trends, to identify terms that people are discussing on Twitter, in real time.
What other methods do you to identify keywords and trends that are outside of the basic search keyword tool spectrum? Please feel free to share in the comments.
Alternative Forms of Keyword Research | Daily SEO Tip http://tinyurl.com/af3y7u
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Alternative Forms of Keyword Research http://tinyurl.com/af3y7u
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Forums are another place to get keyword ideas. Getting the information out of the many, many posts that some forums have may require some automation though.
Marios Alexandrou’s last incredible blog post..Hide SEO Under the Cloak of Usability
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I like going to Semager.com to type in some terms and see what is developed by their semantic connections. I use the analyze websites function to check out a website, but I sort of tag surf the words to see what other semantic possibilities come up. Then I check my list on other sites like Google Trends.
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Talk to 7th or 8th graders about how they’d search, since the average US citizen reads at the 7th or 8th grade level.
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Hmm. I never knew about Facebook Lexicon, great find Loren. Keep up the great tips.
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I didn’t know about Facebook Lexicon either!
Wanted to add a couple other keyword tools for watching words people use and what’s hot:
Delicious.com - look at most popular tags and bookmarks
Craigslist.com - look under their Discussion Forums, great insight
Dana Lookadoo’s last incredible blog post..Twitter Engages Professional Cycling Fans
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@josh do you really talk to 7th and 8th graders ?
As for me,I also use l3xicon.com apart from the tools mentioned here but did not know about Facebook lexicon,thanks Loren…..
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Thanks Lore for great info, I didnt aware about popular keywords term from delicious, facebook’s lexicon.. It’s seems very interesting. Mostly i used google’s search based keyword tool and word tracker for keyword research.
Web design company india’s last incredible blog post..Benefits of using social bookmarking
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UrbanDictionary.com can also provide interesting words.
PS: Sorry I had to shoot your twitter bird with AdBlock. It is nice but I wish its fly were less eye-catching.
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I first go to my competition’s websites and analyze their keywords, then look for long tail possibilities they missed.
Jim D’s last incredible blog post..Who will offer the first break-out enterprise social media management (SMM) platform – TweetDeck, Responsys, perhaps Google?
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Glad I’m not the only one who had that head-smacking moment of realization about the potential usefulness of Facebook Lexicon. Well done for pointing it out Loren, good way to pick up a seed list for new trends before plowing into some of the other tools to build out a list of longtails.
I’ve also found that Google’s Webmaster Tools (specifically the Top Search Queries report) can be a handy way to identify your site’s SERP “also-rans” i.e. the long (and sometimes short) -tail searches that you’re currently not quite ranking high enough for to actually get any traffic. Picking up on these and either tweaking existing pages or building new, more targeted content can be a great way to scoop up some of the stragglers. Sometimes you’ll even find a few gems that you hadn’t previously considered that’ll give you new ideas for posts on related sujects.
Ken Jones’s last incredible blog post..Real SEOs Don’t Run (Ranking Reports) - Or do they?
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Facebook Lexicon was new to me. Thanks for relevant post.
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Hi Loren readers n posters … excellent info even though I speed read it only to shoot down here to ask you if you have ever thought to put a print page out button … I’m always clicking to good sites because of twitter I get to see so many pages of readable content … but I want to be able to chose when I read it just a friendly thought.
all my best to you and yours
Phillip Skinner
Create content faster than you dreamed possible!’s last incredible blog post..Ten Website Design Rules For High Search Engine Rankings
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In addition to post, the free utility synonymbase.com for selection keywords and as similar(wow!) keywords
Search over 200 million keys.
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Try SEMRush.com. The one of my favourite tool to analyze any site.
Just enter the url and it will provide you with a report which includes organic and adwords keywords
that you can find the site, positions, CPC by and more. And its all summurized in easy to understand charts.
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Besides the tools to search for keywords, I usually ask my clients as they look for my services on the Internet, so I try to use a wider variety of keywords and the result has been very good.
Excellent post!
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There are so many tools for kw research, but my fav of late is the G wonderwheel
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nice article on keyword research thanks for sharing
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