Using Google Search For Keyword Research

Doing keyword research?  Go straight to Google.

Google has some excellent ways of doing keyword research that will help you find – and refine – niche phrases that are relevant to your particular business.

If you delve a little further, there are also tools that will provide insights as to how often certain words and phrases are searched for and the search trends for those keywords over time.  They’ll reveal changes in consumer behaviour and consumers’ search intent so you can adjust your SEO strategy accordingly to increase traffic and improve your website’s rankings and visibility in the search results.

All of this information is absolutely crucial in helping you distil your list of potential keywords into a shortlist of highly relevant, niche keywords that will deliver results.  But remember, keyword research isn’t a once-off exercise.  The search engine world is dynamic and your research has to be on an ongoing process to ensure you stay relevant in this ever-changing space.

As a start, try these easy ways of using Google for keyword research:

Do a Google search on your own keywords

Type in one of your keywords into Google and then press the Space bar.  A list of related search phrases will appear and you can then jot down any that are relevant to your business.

Scroll right to the end of the Google search results page

Type in one of your keywords into Google and instead of pressing the space bar, press Enter and then scroll to the bottom of the page.  Here you’ll find a list of ‘searches related to {whatever your original search term was}’.   This could also be a source of more useful ideas.   And for a bonus tip here – type in some of those related search terms and scroll through their related search terms for any possibilities.

Use Google Search to find ‘People Also Search For’ information

To do this, firstly do a Google search for one of your keywords.  When the results come up, click on one of your competitors’ websites, then click on the Back button to get back to the search results.  This page will now display a box called ‘People Also Search For’ or ‘People Also Consider’ which contains more keywords that could be relevant to your business.

These lists are slightly different for each website, so go through the process for a couple of competitors and look closely at the results.

Google your competitors

Use Google search to look at what keywords your competitors are using.  Again, type in one of your keywords and see what websites come up and what their title tags are.

A word of caution here.  While you will be able to see the keywords that your competitors are using, remember that they may not have done thorough keyword research -so you will need to qualify this information by making sure that people are actually searching for those keywords.  In other words, doing your keyword research properly!

As you can see, there’s a wealth of information on Google which you can use as part of your keyword research and there aren’t any complicated procedures or sign-up requirements to follow either.  Best of all, it’s free.

It’s a really useful resource to help you draw up a list of possible keywords and phrases which you can then go on to refine into niche and highly relevant ones which you can target for your SEO.   Thumbs up for Google!