4 Easy Ways To Unlock The Potential Of Unexplored Keywords

There’s no question that successful SEO work depends largely on the keywords that you’re looking to target in your content. However, many digital marketers and SEO experts tend to rely too heavily on similar keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner to obtain their keywords.

This inevitable leads many people to target a handful of common search terms, leading to increased competition on those specific keywords, making it much harder to rank for them. Rather than being too specific about your keyword group, it’s often best to branch out and explore a wide range of subtopics within your sector, giving you access to many more keywords to choose from that your target searcher will be looking for.

If, for example, you are in the fitness niche, you may use the words closely related such as ‘fitness’, ‘exercise’ and ‘work out’, but your audience will also be likely looking at a broader range of search terms such as ‘bodybuilding’, ‘work out plans’ and ‘how to lose weight’.

If you are in a sector which is specific and narrow, such as ‘forensic accounting’, then you have to do some research on the words and phrases your target audience uses, finding those gold nuggets which haven’t yet caught the attention of your competition.

Here we will look at four of the easiest ways to find the right type of keywords for your sector, and how to gain a deeper insight into analysing their potential for driving traffic properly.

1. Put Yourself In Your Customer’s Position

It’s easy to have a one-sided view of a company or business when you are too involved, but take a step back and look at your business from the point of view of a potential customer. You can brainstorm keywords yourself thinking about what your customer may be searching for, however you may limit yourself by only coming up with the most obvious ones – ones that turn out to have the highest volume of searches. This means that those keywords are going to be difficult to achieve a high ranking for, as everyone else in your sector has already had the same idea.

Did you realise that not everybody uses the search engine the same way, and people even go out of their way to use phrases which they believe will give them the best result? Did you know that up to 20% of searches that take place through Google will never have been tried before?

Understanding this slight difference gives you the opportunity to get your foot in the door and access new and previously unknown keywords which have the potential to drive traffic to your site.

For example, someone who owns a greeting card store may focus on the main keywords such as ‘buy cards online’ or ‘cheap birthday card’, but many people may actually find that company by searching terms such as ‘what to write inside a wedding card’ or ‘best way to congratulate somebody getting engaged’.

This type of search involving long-tail keywords is just basic brainstorming, and at this stage you shouldn’t worry about the difficulty or what kind of search volume the keyword has. If you get stuck, then just imagine you have no knowledge of what you’re selling, as if it doesn’t exist and you are trying to describe what it is. Give some thought to how people actually think and speak in their daily life, what kind of language they use and will they just use layman’s words to describe it.

2. Search Communities And Other Sites Of User-Generated Content

By examining user-generated content from sites like Quora, Medium or Reddit you can quickly gain an understanding of how your site is being spoken of from the inside, between your clients and customers.

This is a great place to look because it’s where people flock to when they aren’t able to discover what they want from searches on the internet – due to a current lack of informative content around the subject matter. You’ll be able to glean keywords and phrases associated with your niche, and gain a better understanding of the types of things your customers are interested in.

Search buying sites for similar products to yours and see what real consumers are saying in the reviews. Amazon and eBay are a good place to start, and it’s likely you’ll discover new key phrases you’d never imagined before.

3. Scout Social Media

If you want a real and raw look at how people are discussing problems related to your niche, posing questions to each other, then social media is an excellent way to gain an insight. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, these personal accounts of your potential customers are often unfiltered to a certain extent and give you a glimpse behind the curtain of how your sector, services or products are being talked about online.

Aside from the search engines, many people turn to this form of communication to find the answers to questions. A good place to look is within groups on Facebook or profiles on LinkedIn by people either in your industry or closely related. What is being posted? What are the comments saying? Are they directing others to a certain source of information that you could replicate?

4. Engage With Your Customer Base

A great tip to generate some effective keywords is to talk directly to your customers wherever possible, or even friends and family who know what your business is all about. It can be tricky if you’re actually doing the work in your business on a daily basis to engage with customers on this topic, but you can use anything at your disposal to gather information – review and recommendation cards or the results from the search bar on your site, or from Google to see which search queries sent people to you.

You can ask them what kind of aims or struggles they have in relation to your business, and you’ll get to know how you are perceived from the outside a great deal better. This will help you to gather information on how these people are speaking about your business, and possibly uncover new and innovative ways that they can find you. Once you have deciphered the keywords you’d like to use, add them to your list and aim to incorporate them within your content.

Take these four steps on board and you’ll soon have a whole host of keywords that you can begin to target or include sporadically within your existing content so that those kinds of searches lead to your website over a competitors who may have not addressed such seemingly unappealing keywords.