Keyword research is really the foundation of SEO and if you don’t find good keywords, everything else is worthless – your on-site optimization depends on the keywords, the links depend on the keywords, and your sales depend on your keyword intent and volume.

Today were laying out 3 strategies that make it nearly impossible to fail to find good kws. These techniques & tools will take out the guess work. By the end you will have deconstructed exactly what your competition is doing, maximized the information you can get from Google, AND researched every combination in a 25 mile radius of your target area… BOOM! You’re unstoppable.

Here we go…

Technique #1 – Researching the Competition

What is your competition doing? If they are successful what key words are they using? If they are failing, what key words are they missing? You need to research all your competitors, look behind the scenes to determine where the clicks are going and why.

Here’s How:

1. Search for general head terms + city / keywords etc in your area:
Just start typing in general terms that you think someone would search for. Try a few different ones. Start with what kinds of services you provide + the city name like “kitchen remodeling denver” etc.

2. Copy down the top 5-10 ranking websites for these terms
Get a good list of the URLs of competitors. Don’t use sites like BBB or Yelp, look for sites of your competitors.

3. Put into SEMRush, go to organic positions
Sign up for SEMRush, type in the URL at the top and then go to Organic Positions on the left.

4. Export to CSV
Export the organic keywords that they rank for to CSV.

5. Merge, sort by volume, and Viola!
Put all the files together, sort by volume and look for good keywords there. You should be able to get a good sense of the most popular (and least popular) keywords in about 10-20 min….

 

 

Technique #2 – Related Keyword Scrape

For this technique, we’re going to get all the Google suggested searches and maximize the info that Google gives us. Suggested / related searches are a good way to find what kinds of other alternative phrases that people are searching for related to your keywords.

1. Get them manually via Google
Just search for your main terms, then go down to the bottom under “Related Searches” and copy>paste good ones into a text document.

2. Alternatively, use SEMRush again
You can just plop any keywords you want into the top of SEMRush and it will spit out related searches as well. Get the “Related Keywords Report” and export that.

3. Merge everything
You can merge both keyword lists from technique 1 & 2 and you should have a pretty big list by now.

 

 

Technique #3 – Check out the Local Listings

OK, so now we have a bunch of LEAD Key Words! … let’s see if any surrounding areas have volume! What we’re going to do for this is get all of our main terms, add in every single surrounding city / suburb, combine them, make a huge list of all the possible variations, then check keyword volume on everything.

1. Bust out your list of lead key words and terms
Terms with no geo modifier that you found with 1 & 2. Alternatively, you can get a huge list by using keywordtool.io (Google suggest scraper).

2. Make a huge list of the keywords + every city (automatically)
Go go the 5 min site local kw generator, put in your zip code, your radius that you want to serve, uncheck zip, check the keyword + city / city + keyword option, then hit sumbit.

3. Put it into an excel file / csv
Just copy that huge list into excel, save it as a CSV

4. Check the volume on everything
Go to the Google Keyword Planner, Go to check keyword volume, upload the file, sort by volume and see if you found any winners.