You’ve hit the wall with keyword research. You’ve used the new Ubersuggest even though you don’t like it, you’ve scraped Google’s Keyword Explorer, you’ve cross-referenced everything on MOZ to make sure your keywords are viable organically. You implemented the best keywords months ago and the traffic never came. What did you do wrong? Nothing, that is thorough keyword research!
However, you may have missed a couple hidden keyword gems in there. Now that you are familiar with the process of keyword research, let’s take a little deeper dive into keyword research and find some of those hidden keyword gems!
Long-tail Keyword Research
Now that you have data coming to your site that you can analyze, you can start your research from a slightly different angle:
- Look at the queries in Google Search console that are ranked between 10 and 30 and start your keyword list with these.
- Start with your most trusted research tool (Keyword Explorer, Moz, Ubersuggest, Keywords Everywhere, etc.) and run the best queries through that. Then run them through at least one other research tool. This surfaces long-tail keywords most of the time while also cross referencing data between different sources.
- Take all of the long-tail keywords from this result and run them through Google Ads’ Keyword Explorer, Moz or another tool that gives you monthly search volume.
- Take any of these long-tail keywords that register a good amount of traffic (this depends on your site) and type them into a search engine to see what auto-complete comes up with.
- If auto-complete surfaces some good results, add those to your list.
- This gives you your long-tail keywords that you can use to optimize your site.
Long-tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords aren’t always the keywords that are going to bring in droves of traffic, but they are going to be your consistent base of traffic. Not only that, but long-tail keywords encompass other keywords that can prove extremely valuable. Not only that, but your long-tail keywords are also a great way to analyze where a searcher is in your conversion funnel.
Creating Keywords From Long-tail Keywords
Now that you have a solid base of new long-tail keywords, you can cull this list a bit further:
- Go back through your long-tail keywords and strip out any words that make the long-tail keywords long-tail.
- Many of these keywords should match with other results that you have gotten from your research tools, but there should be a few that don’t and these can be goldmines when optimizing content.
- Set your long-tail and short-tail keywords aside and go back through your much larger list.
- Delete any keywords that either don’t make sense, don’t fit into the site’s content, or don’t see enough (any) traffic.
- Go back through the list one more time and refine it to the most usable keywords. With Keyword Explorer you can get a list of 700 words, and even after culling the list to 150 or so you are never going to be able to use all of those keywords throughout a site, no matter how large the site is.
- Combine both your long-tail list and your new list of keywords and remove any duplicates.
- You should be left with 30-50 keywords, both short and long-tail, that you can now use to optimize your site – if you have more keywords than you know what to do with, shorten it.
Utilize New Keywords
At this point, if your site is smaller, you can use the top 15-20 keywords and optimize pages on your site with these while using the rest of the keywords on the list as ideas for future pages, blog posts, or backup options if you find that your initial list isn’t jam-packed with hidden keyword gems.
Another great way to surface some gems of keywords is through looking at seasonality and getting out ahead of a holiday, event, or season by optimizing specific pages for what lies ahead. This should be done at least 3 weeks in advance if you know your site is getting crawled frequently, but you might want to think about getting those pages optimized even 3 months in advance if your site is small, doesn’t get a ton of traffic, or you feel really motivated.
For more help with keyword research, contact Anvil Media today.