How to Find Keywords for a Website – 4 Simple Methods

Many people start a website without a concept of how their target market will get there. They don’t have a firm grasp of keyword research. They may understand that people search each month for different keywords, but they don’t realize that there is a lot of competition within each keyword for the top spot. Other people may assume that lots of keyword searches will lead to results regardless of the competition, but in reality, if you aren’t showing up on the first page of google in one of the top three spots, it is unlikely that you will receive that traffic that you targeted with your keyword. Today, I will discuss how to find keywords for a website in three simple steps.

Smart marketers go after the low competition keywords that do get some traffic each month. The reasoning for that is that they are likely to get ranked on the first page for those keywords. While the keywords may get fewer search engine results, grabbing the low competition traffic gives them a chance at survival. It gives them some traffic to their website each month.

Use a Keyword Tool to Generate Keyword Ideas

Begin by opening up your keyword tool and typing in what you would like to focus your website on. For example, if you are building a website on growing tomatoes, you may want to type in “grow tomatoes,” and look at how many searches and how many other websites have that topic. Grow tomatoes is most likely too broad. Your reader may want to grow cherry tomatoes and your website is dedicated to heirloom tomatoes. As you are looking at the results that came up in your keyword tool, you may want to figure out if you can find a more specific topic that has less competition. “Growing yellow heirloom tomatoes” may be what closer to what your target audience wants.

By checking out the keyword tool’s search results, you can get a better idea of what people are looking for reagrding your topic.

The “Alphabet Soup” Method

For the alphabet soup method of finding keywords, you are going to go into Google and type your main keyword. After you type in the keyword, you are going to type in the first letter of the alphabet and see what pops up afterward. Google will pull up the things that people have been searching for below their search box. This will give you even more insight into the keywords that you can further research.

After you have gone through the alphabet, you will have some more ideas on keywords that you can look further into and see if they meet your criteria. Keep in mind that just because they pop up in the search results doesn’t mean that they are going to be low competition keywords. They are just the ones that have been recently searched for in Google, which is a good thing.

“How to…” Keywords

These days, there are many do it yourselfers online. When you are looking for long tail keywords, you may want to focus on how to do something. If we take our gardening example, you could research terms like “how to start tomato plants from seed.” Or you could dig a bit deeper into the topic of growing heirloom tomatoes, and do something like, “how to save heirloom tomato seeds.” These would target the tomato gardeners that are specifically interested in heirloom seeds.

Creating a bunch of “How to” articles on your website gives your visitors a lot of value. They don’t feel like you are just selling to them, they see you as someone who truly wants to share your knowledge and be successful. Many times when I am searching for keywords, I simply add how to in front of the idea and bingo! I’ve discovered a long tail keyword with little to no competition. Some niches are going to be a bit tougher than others, but you get the idea. Teach someone how to do something and they will come back over and over again. You’ll have a devoted reader!

Finding Buyer Keywords

This one is a little bit trickier because people are wary of being sold products. They can generally tell when something is simply sales copy or the person is full of it. However, we are now in the age of online shopping. People who are looking to buy something are likely to look for reviews, so using the product title and adding review to it can help to narrow down the competition. For example, taking the heirloom tomato example, you would use Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato reviews. For something that specific, you could also use “Buy cherokee purple tomato seeds.” That may not have a lot of competition because it is so specific.

Buyers tend to also like to read about the Pros and Cons of a product. Adding the words Pros and Cons to the title could narrow down your competition and still bring in a lot of search results. Buyers tend to want to avoid scams, so taking a product and questioning whether it is a scam or not in the title is something that many affiliate marketers do to reduce competition when targeting a keyword.

When you are writing a product review, keep in mind that buyers are always looking for the best on the market. You can add “Best” to you keyword in order to create a long tail keyword with less competition. For example, “Best beefsteak tomato” or “Best fertilizer for growing tomatoes.”

Conclusion

Finding the right keyword for your audience is more of an art than a science. You will discover that you spend a bit of time looking at word combinations and figuring out different ways to say the same thing sometimes. However, the keyword research will pay off when you start receiving traffic to your website. You’ll realize that gaining a few visitors a month consistently was far better than chasing the biggest search result and trying to edge out your competitor who is spending thousands on his website to stay in that top spot.