Advanced Keyword Discovery

Google AdWords offers a free tool (the Google Keyword Tool) to show you the monthly search volume for keywords and keyword phrases, a gross estimate of the relative competition for those keywords, and other suggested keywords based on your query. This is a great tool but it doesn’t necessarily give you all of the valuable and high volume keyword phrases out there. Right off the bat, logging into your AdWords account will improve your results, but there are a few other ways to address this challenge in addition.

1. With a relatively minimal budget you can buy some broad keywords in AdWords and direct the ads to a relevant page on your site. The data you gain from such a campaign will illuminate the keywords for which you get impressions.
2. When searching in AdWords, start with broad-match keyword phrases, and narrow your queries from there. Be sure to use the exact match feature and test all the variations that the tool serves up. It seems tedious, but that’s where you’ll find the unexploited niches and little hidden gems.
3. If you discover unique keyword phrases with different intent, you might consider targeting individual pages to each of those queries. You’ll have to do much work to get those highly-targeted pages to rank quickly.

A few other great ways to find keywords are as follows:

• Check out your competition
• Get a list of services or products from your client
• Use search engine auto suggest scrapers
• Examine the current site
• Use other tools such as Wordtracker