One of the smartest things you can do when initially conducting keyword research is to use automated tools to brainstorm original ideas with the participants in the business. This can be surprisingly effective for coming up with numerous critical keywords.
Start by generating a list of terms and phrases that are relevant to your industry and pertain to what your site or business offers. The brainstorming phase should ideally result in a list of several dozen to several hundred or more keyword searches that will bring relevant, qualified visitors to your site.
One easy way to begin this process is to gather your team in a conference room and then follow these steps:
Produce a list of key one- to three-word phrases that describe your products/services.
Spend some time coming up with synonyms that your potential customers might use for those products and services. Use a thesaurus to help you with this process.
Create a taxonomy of all the areas of focus in your industry. It can be helpful to imagine creating a directory for all the people, projects, ideas, and companies connected to your site. You can also look at sites that are leaders in the industry and study their site hierarchy as a way to start your thinking about a taxonomy.
Broaden your list by thinking of higher-level terms of which your products or services are a subset.
Review your existing site, and extract what appear to be key phrases from your site.
Review industry association and/or media sites to see what phrases they use to discuss your topic area.
List all your various brand terms.
List all your products. If your site has a massive number of products, consider stepping back a level (or two) and listing the categories and subcategories.
Have your team step back and imagine they are a potential customer, and ask them what they would type into a search engine if they were looking for something similar to your product or service.
Supplement this by asking some people outside your business what they would search for, preferably people who are not directly associated with the company.
Use your web analytics tool to see what terms people are already using to come to your site.
Gathering this type of intelligence is what a traditional marketer might have done prior to initiating a marketing campaign before the Web existed. And of course, if any of this data is available to you from other departments of the company, be sure to incorporate it into your research process.
Your competitors face the same problem, and unless you are very lucky, they are also probably resourceful and creative. You can likely count on their having invested in learning how their customers think and the best ways to appeal to them. So, add these steps to the process:
Review your competitors’ websites and see what key phrases they use for their products and services that compete with yours.
Record what nonbrand terms they use for their business.
Read any articles they have written that are published on sites other than their own.
Observe what the media may have had to say about them.
Add these ideas into the mix and you will have a wonderfully robust set of keywords to use as a starting point.
You may ask why you should go through all this trouble. Don’t the keyword tools take care of all this for you? There are two reasons why the extra effort is critical:
Your internal team has a rich array of knowledge that the keyword tools do not: they know where to start. Keyword tools require the initial input of information, and the quality of the data they provide is only as good as the quality of the “seeds” you give them.
The upfront brainstorming helps your organization’s stakeholders better understand the market and the opportunities.
Once you have completed these steps you will have in hand a rich set of terms of interest. The next step is to expand those terms of interest using keyword research tools.