Although search algorithms have changed over the years, keyword research still matters. Using the right keyword research software could determine your site’s success or failure, but how do get keyword ideas?

In particular, finding solid long tail keywords with lower competition is still hugely important, especially for those with new sites or sites without a ton of authority.

One of the hurdles I’ve run into from time to time is hitting a mental block when it comes to discovering new, creative keyword ideas. Even if you know your niche like the back of your hand, there are still times you hit a wall and wonder “are there any good, low competition keywords left?“. This is especially true if you own an Amazon Affiliate site and you’ve run out of ‘best X’ keywords to try and rank for.

If you’ve felt the same way, then please read on.

We’re going to cover 7 different ideas to both find more creative seed keywords for your Long Tail Pro projects, and find lists of keywords that you can copy/paste into Long Tail Platinum for further analysis.

Try it for free: To search for low competition keywords in your niche with Long Tail Pro, Click Here 

1. Get Keyword Ideas – Soovle Your Ideas

Soovle is a free keyword ideas tool that quickly gives you related keyword ideas from Google, Bing, Amazon, Answers.com, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Youtube.

It’s been around for awhile, but is still a time-saving way to discover some keywords that you might not have thought of.

You start by typing in a keyword and Soovle will instantly pull back the suggested searches from each one of these sites. As you can imagine, the searches someone does most often on Amazon for a topic may be very different than what people search on Youtube.

So Soovle gives you a nice mix of ideas.

When you type in a word or phrase, you’ll get results that look like this:

 

From there, you can copy/paste those results into the “Add My Own Keywords” box of Long Tail Platinum:

After you fetch the data, you can then sort based on the monthly search volume and calculate the competitiveness of any keywords you are interested in.

 

 

In the video below, I show the whole process using “how to play drums” as an example:

 

2. See What Your Competitors Rank For

How helpful would it be to know exactly what your competitors are ranking for in the search engines?

More than likely, your competition is ranking for keywords that you could rank for as well, only if you knew what those keywords were.

Enter SEMRush.

SEMRush is a robust SEOTool, and it is one we use for our businesses. One of the most helpful things you can do is find out exactly who your competitors are, and then get a list of all the search terms they rank in the top 20 for.

My buddy Perrin detailed this strategy a while ago on the Niche Pursuits blog, click here if you’d like to check it out.

Here is a high level overview of this strategy.

1. Input your site, or a competing site in to the main search bar and then click on “overview”

2. Scroll down and view a list of the main competitors. 

3. Look for small to medium-sized sites and click on the URL to pull up that site in SEMRush.

The idea here is to start with less authoritative sites that are ranking for a bunch of keywords in your niche. The fact that they are able to rank well for certain terms is a good sign for you – since they are a small to medium-sized brand like you. By starting with sites of similar size and authority to you, you’ll find some solid keywords to target in the list of what they currently rank for.

4. Pull up the list of keywords they rank for.

Click on “Organic Research” and then click on “Positions” to pull up this list.

Once you click “Positions” you’ll see this:

By default, SEMRush sorts the keywords by the percentage of organic traffic they deliver for that site. So the keywords that bring them the most traffic are listed first.

5. Analyze Keywords in Long Tail Pro 

The final step is to take any keywords you are interested in, meaning they are a good fit for your site, and drop those into Long Tail Pro’s “quick analyze” field and see what the competition looks like overall.

In the example above, “best rifle for deer hunting” gets 720 searches per month and stood out as a keyword of interest. After checking it in Long Tail Platinum, I find that it is something I should be able to compete for:

 

You can follow this strategy over and over again to find fresh keyword ideas to create content for.

Click here for more details on this strategy.

3.  Niche Forums

Forums are still alive and well!

They may look a bit out of date, but seemingly every niche has at least one forum that is full of active, engaged enthusiasts on your topic.

Needless to say, these are exactly the kinds of people you want visiting your site and becoming your subscribers, customers, etc.

Checking forums helps you understand the questions they have and the lingo they use.

In turn, these can be fantastic seed keyword ideas to use in Long Tail Pro.

The simplest way to find forums in your industry is to go to Google and search “keyword + forum.”

I used my earlier example about playing drums and look what I found:

At least 4 solid forums that are exclusively aimed at drummers.

I clicked on the first one and then jumped into their drumming technique forum where I found a bunch of topics like this:

Now I’m not a drummer and I know very little about the topic. However, I’m scanning this list and see a few things that I might use as seed keywords:

– Hi Hat Beats

– Drum Practice Routine

– Drumming Practice Techniques

– Brush Technique

– Dave Grohl

Obviously if you really were a drumming expert, you could do a much better job of scrolling through this list and picking out relevant keyword ideas. Once you have 5 – 10, drop them into Long Tail Pro as seed keywords and see what you get:

This gave me over 1,700 ideas, including some low competition gems like “how to practice drums” with a KC of 23:

 

4. Amazon Kindle Book Titles

Like with forums, there are Kindle ebooks available on virtually any topic you can think of. At the time of this writing, there are over 3.7M Kindle books listed on Amazon.

Kindle books are also another free way to find keyword ideas for your website.

To do this, simply go over to Amazon’s Kindle Store and search for your topic or keyword. I typed in “drumming” to stick with my example, and found results like this on page 1 (of 11 pages).

Clearly you can do this again and again with similar and related keywords, recording any seed keyword ideas that you discover.

In the image above, I’d probably look into “stick control,” “snare drummer,” “drum coordination,” and maybe a couple more.

5. Mass Import Google Suggestions

One of my favorite free tools to get keyword ideas is Ubersuggest.

Similar to Soovle, Ubersuggest takes your keyword and then provides other suggestions using that keyword. In this case, it uses Google’s suggestions to take your keyword and then add on every letter of the alphabet, giving you hundreds of suggestions. Click here to get more creative ideas on how to use Ubersuggest.

Below is what Ubersuggest looks like when I type in “beard.”

 

After running the suggestions, simply highlight all the keywords on the page and copy/paste them into Long Tail Platinum to get the search volume data and run your competitive analysis.

In one of our Long Tail Pro demo videos, I show exactly how to get suggestions and add them to Long Tail Platinum:

6. Related Searches For Seed Keywords

Besides the Google instant suggestions, you’ll also notice that Google gives you “related searches” at the bottom of your search results.

Here are my related searches when I pop “drumming” into Google:

You might think that all of these related searches would be automatically included when you use “drumming” as a seed keyword.

However, that isn’t necessarily the case.

I added drumming as a seed keyword and got 653 ideas, but “history of drumming” and “drumming song lyrics” weren’t part of those results.

So I could take those 2 keywords and enter them as seed keywords, if they were relevant enough to my site. I ended up doing just that, and I got an additional 561 keyword ideas.

Simply rinse and repeat to find additional seed keywords for your projects.

7. Focus on Problems

I first heard about this idea listening to Marcus Sheridan, who was involved in a small pool company struggling to stay afloat. They used content marketing and blogging to almost single-handedly turn around the company’s fortunes by bringing in new leads and customers.

One thing he mentions is that they tackled “negative” questions about pools; like “what are problems with fiberglass pools?”

Despite the fact that they sold fiberglass pools, they saw the value in acknowledging that they weren’t perfect – because it was an opportunity to build trust with their audience.

To this day, River Pools and Spas holds the number 1 spot in Google when you search “problems with fiberglass pools.”

Marcus reported that this page generated millions of dollars in sales for their business over the years.

Think about how this strategy could apply to your business or website.

People who are researching a product often look for things like:

“Problems with…”

“Complaints about…”

“Worst…”

“Issues with…”

I mentioned this concept in an early article about making money as an Amazon affiliate, because focusing on problems in your industry can lead to great sales opportunities.

The guy searching for problems or complaints probably wants to know if the good outweighs the bad. If not, he’s still looking to buy so he’d likely be open to your suggestion about a model that is higher quality and more reliable.

How can you use problems to find keyword ideas?

1. If you run a business like Marcus did with the pool company, you probably get these questions all the time anyway. If you don’t personally, ask your sales staff to jot down the common questions they get in this category.

Once you have some real questions from your customers, simply answer them in a blog post.

Even if the keyword research data (like the monthly search volume) isn’t that great – go ahead and answer it anyway.

The odds are that if people ask you directly, many more people are asking a similar question in Google. By answering the question on your website, you demonstrate your authority on the topic and you help build trust by showing that you can be honest about the products you sell.

Don’t be afraid to answer these kinds of questions head on, as it gives you an opportunity to own the conversation with your readers and your audience. If you don’t answer their questions, someone else will – and it may cost you a customer.

2. If you aren’t in a business or position where you would get these questions directly and need some ideas, use tools like Long Tail Pro, Soovle, and Ubersuggest to drop in words like “problems” and “complaints” with your keywords, brand names, product types, etc. and get a bunch of ideas for what people are actually searching.

It’s easy to overlook these and only look for positive modifiers like “Best…”, “Top…”, etc.

When you compile a list of suggestions, go through the competitive analysis process and look for those keywords that fit your content, and ideally have low enough competition that you can compete.

As stated in #1, not every keyword needs to be low competition to focus on it for your blog. If you find an industry problem that you feel like you should talk about – go ahead and do it. If your human audience would get value from it – forget the keyword metrics and go for it.

You can promote that content on your social media channels, to your email list, and through email outreach to other influencers in the industry to help get eyeballs on your content.

Wrap Up

Hopefully some of these keyword ideas for SEO are new to you and will give you another avenue to discover more keyword ideas for your business.

Do you have any other methods for finding keyword ideas?

If so, please share in the comments below:

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