Keyword Research Tools and Ideas

Key Takeaways

with keyword match types changing or going away and the lean towards automation it could be easy to feel like keywords aren't important anymore but that's totally not true keywords are still very relevant and important to building a good search campaign so in this video we want to show you our favorite ways we conduct keyword research before launching anything new we're going to go over what you can do by looking at your own campaigns looking within the search channels themselves as well as some of our favorite third-party options to make sure that before you launch a search campaign that you have a proper foundation i'm not going to spend a ton of time on the first two tools i'm going to talk about that is because we already have other videos going deeper into these but they're still very important to help you with your keyword research as you can see we're in google ads so the first one is going to be the google ads keyword planner no matter where you are in google ads you can find this tool by going up to your tools and settings and all the way to the left we see keyword planner you can then choose discover new keywords and then we have a few different options on where we can begin the first option you have is to just start typing in a few different keywords phrases search terms whatever that are going to fit with the main topic or subject that you want to research for more additional keyword ideas i just typed in three options really quick and then we can choose get results if we look up above i'm researching the entire united states in the english language on just google i could switch and change this to be google plus search partners but it's going to default to just google.com and you can adjust those to be whatever you want so you can research the appropriate volume because you're going to see differences in the amount of traffic each of the relevant keywords get depending on how you update any of these filters but we see in the left hand column we get a list of keywords right now sorted by relevance the amount of monthly searches they get and the low to high ranges for top of page bid estimates if i move my mouse out of the way and highlight the section right here google does offer some suggestions to broaden your reach that's not really applicable to this one because one the suggestions they're recommending don't fit at all and two i have plenty of different options down below i really only look at the broad in your search part if i'm running out of keyword ideas or anything that i typed in originally did not pull up any results i was being too specific but if i go and select a few of these options you will see a blue bar will pop up where you can start creating a plan it's like pretty much you're starting to create your own ad group where you can export the plan later on you can also go up top to the top right corner and download those keyword ideas if you have to share with a client your boss whatever to have them review the keywords first to get approval before you can add them into the account if you're typing in keywords you can only add 10 at a time so it may take a few rounds of trying different keywords and seeing what pops up for now i'm going to clear these three out and show you the other way we can research keywords with the google keyword planner and that is to start with a website now i can enter in a specific domain and i can tell google to either use the entire website or just use this page that would be just our home page we have a super small site probably most of the pages on our site that has keyword related content would be our blog page so i would want to use the entire site in our case but depending on the size of your website or the specific goals of a campaign or ad group you're trying to research for you may want to choose a specific page for now i'm just going to get results and then based upon the content our website has we get recommendations from google based upon the content of our website and since our website talks about our latest videos and we have a few blogs up there that have transcripts for our videos we see that the keyword suggestions are very relevant so just like the other option i could choose to select certain keywords and add them to a plan how about that one keyword advertise youtube video on youtube has a top of bid high range of a thousand dollars in the us not going to go after that one but that's okay again this is one where we already have a video that goes much more in depth about the keyword planner tool and you can watch that one right here i didn't want to spend too much time on it so let's hop into our second tool and that is going to be microsoft advertising intelligence now you may think we should hop right into microsoft ads but that's not what i'm going to do for this one i'm actually going to open up microsoft excel as i mentioned before we already have a video covering microsoft advertising intelligence there is a lot to cover on how this keyword research tool works so i really suggest checking that one out it's going to cover way more than what i could do in this compilation video a big reason to check it out is how to download this feature into microsoft excel this is a plugin you have to download separately it does not come automatically with microsoft excel but as you follow my mouse i'm hovering over it right now and if i click on it we can see we now have a variety of keyword research tools added into microsoft excel so let me go over just a few of them and i'm going to jump cut really quick because you will have to sign into a microsoft ads account before you can start pulling some of this data now that i'm signed in i can show you just a few of these tools and some of my favorite tools are actually hidden under more research so similar to google we see web page keywords if i go and actually type in a website url and have a maximum of 100 keywords now i'm going to hit submit and here we get a list of keywords based upon the url that we gave microsoft very similar to what we just went over with google now most likely every keyword that they suggest is not going to be relevant and i'm not saying the ones i'm going to select are going to be relevant but i'm just going to choose a few options let's pretend these highlighted options are the ones i would want to go after in a paid search campaign i can highlight those go up to keyword suggestions click selected items the ones i have highlighted and then we see another tab is going to be generated with keyword suggestions based upon the ones i have highlighted now i pulled those from another tool the web page tool those were a separate list of results but you can paste in a list of your own keywords just like you're typing them in highlight that entire list and find keyword suggestions based upon microsoft data and we can get more specific because we see this data is broken up by match type and they're pulling in the generated keyword based upon the ones i had highlighted so it gets a little bit more in depth than what we can get within google but understand this is from the microsoft network i'm going to switch back to web page keywords as the tab on the bottom keep those same options highlighted go to more research and then look at searches with your keyword we get another tab with the keyword that i had highlighted in the first column and then a search query that has been typed on microsoft that contains that keyword another way for us to get more specific and then if any of those search queries look relevant i could highlight those get even more suggestions on and on and on and on and those are just a few tools i did not even cover everything that this keyword suggestion tool offers that's why i love this thing you can really go down a rabbit hole and sometimes i take these ideas and new keyword suggestions that i find within microsoft take them back to google and sometimes i will see a volume difference between google and microsoft so these two tools can actually really complement each other to help you find new keyword ideas on either google or microsoft ads so to watch the video we made on microsoft advertising intelligence that's going to go much more in depth on a lot of these tools i could not cover today check out this video right here let's move on to the third option i like to use for keyword research and that's heading to google.com because you can just go to google start typing in a search query and you will get a list of suggested keywords i use the core head phrase of small business crm but then we get variants that make this a little bit longer tailed but it can't give me some other specific keyword ideas to go after now besides looking these for new keyword ideas i love using this tool to be proactive about negative keyword research if i'm a sas company who's looking to sell my product to small businesses i'm trying to make money so when i see keyword suggestions of small business crm free small business crm software free small business crm reddit those definitely don't have the intent of someone who's willing to spend money and if these are common keyword suggestions and people go and type these keywords fairly frequently when looking for anything related to small business crms i can probably go in create a negative keyword list and start adding some of these as negatives now these are just probably the top suggestions but if i add another space type in another letter we get even more options that's just typing m what about t there are some valuable ones top small business crm small business crm tools makes complete sense one more platform programs and project management there'll see a few different relevant options that i'll probably want to add a few different ad groups for now if you know they're relevant feel free to just add them and test them but if you don't want to add a ton of low volume keywords to your account take them write down all the suggestions copy them into google keyword planner or the microsoft advertising intelligence get an idea of the volume and possibly use those important keywords to find new suggestions itself but the autosuggest is a great way to find new keywords again for free besides the tools that google and microsoft offers there are a lot of third-party tools out there most of them do come with a charge but some of the third-party tools or websites out there have some free options one of my favorite ones is answer the public so to start off i'm going to go down and type in the same query i typed in when we're looking at the google auto suggest and then we can click search so we see next to small business crm it says 19 questions remember that questions so as i scroll down we get a pretty cool visualization but these are questions related to the search term i typed into the tool let me highlight this right here because it's the easiest to read what's small business crm what does small business crm mean in this case probably not that relevant if i'm looking to try to get someone wanting to buy something i don't want to explain to people what my product is i want to get people who already know what it is and need a suggestion or need the tool itself however there are going to be plenty of other industries or accounts out there where you could have the answer to a problem or a solution so finding these question type queries could be very helpful if we scroll down a little bit now we see search term recommendations that involve prepositions so let me scroll down a little bit more and these are more appealing for me or people looking for something with a little bit more intent small business crm for mac small business crm with email marketing and if we keep going down we see comparisons and if you're not down with the visuals you just want a straight up list here we go this is something pretty similar to what i was doing in auto suggest typing in the main keyword and then going abc with different letters that will give you a lot of different keyword ideas and this is just one keyword small business crm look at all the different keywords you have possibly pull your best performing ones or ones that you just want to get more traffic for and start trying these if you're not seeing anything relevant within keyword planner auto suggest advertising intelligence whatever maybe try a tool like answer the public you might get some longer tail keywords they may not have a lot of volume but at least to give you something new and then we have tools like semrush if we look in the left hand navigation there are a few different options that we can use i'm just going to click on keyword overview and then type in the same keyword i've been using so far the country i have is united states so we can click analyze then they're giving me stats related to that one particular keyword but if we go down to the second section we see keyword variations and they found 760 of them within the united states as well as 60 questions about that keyword so it kind of overlaps what the ask the people tool can do if i click on this button right here to view all the 760 keyword variations they only give me 10 of them for free and if we scroll down i have to pay if i want to unlock all of them so this is a valuable tool but to get all the features you're going to have to pay for it and they do have a similar tool that can help you look at your competitors we can type in a domain similar to what we did in google after i hit enter we can pull up a specific domain and then we scroll down a little bit we get top organic keywords which you can potentially export and use to see what a certain website is ranking for if we keep scrolling down if that domain is running ads and sending users to a landing page that has that domain in it you can get ideas of top paid keywords i'm not saying copy and paste everything your competitor's doing or another website but it can at least give you an idea of potentially new keywords to go after and just like the other keyword tool i showed you within semrush and since i already did a few research here they're making me pay for it again it's a valuable tool but is it worth the cost we do have a lot of free tools out there i only got to go over just a few of the third-party keyword research tools that are out there we did go over ask the people semrush but there are similar tools out there like spyfu suggests moz has a keyword tool and a few other ones but these are the tools that i have personally used the most some have free options where you can at least get some data before paying more others are straight up paid so it depends on how desperate you are for keywords as well as your marketing budget to see if it's worth going after some of these tools but check some of these out and if i missed any or you have a favorite one that you want to share with the community please let us know in the comments below even though these were all just fake examples i was using for the sake of this video we saw how high some of the keyword volume was for some of these search terms the keyword is not dead it is extremely valuable and it's still important to find new ways to reach your users on search to capitalize on deeper intent while i still love the tools that are available within google and microsoft we see there are many other ways that we can find new keywords it may take a little bit more work than it used to but so many times we've seen when you spend that little bit extra effort in finding some of the longer tail keywords that are still specific you can still reap the rewards and get a new batch of keywords that could be less competitive thus being more profitable for your business hopefully the tools that i showed you helped again check out some of those extra videos where we get a little bit more specific but i guarantee with at least some of the tools that we suggested or showed you in this video you'll be able to find new variations that you can start adding immediately thanks for watching our video if you found it useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to see more from the paid media pros channel be sure to subscribe