Anyone who tells you that keywords are a thing of the past has lost touch with the reality. The truth of the matter is that keyword research is more important and more relevant than ever before; it has just taken on a different form than how it may have looked several years ago.
If you are a blogger, it’s important that you stay on top of the topics that interest your readers. Otherwise, your blog simply becomes another self-serving platform. Think about your audience and the kind of material they wish to read and consume. It’s the same if you’re a YouTuber or if you aim to be a major social media influencer. You need to stay on trend.
Similarly, if you are an Internet marketer, you want to know what keywords your prospective targets are searching for online. This will help you better target your PPC campaigns and it will help you further refine and optimize your landing page to make sure it gets in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
There are numerous keyword research tools out there, some of which are free and some are paid. Today, we’ll highlight one of these. It’s called Ubersuggest.
The site is very clearly ad-supported, so that’s the price you pay for using a free tool. I don’t find the banners to detract from the overall user experience too much. Just like Google, there’s a big search field in the middle of the screen. Start with your root keyword.
You’ll also notice below the search bar that you have two pull-down menus. By and large, you’ll be leaving these at their default settings, but your individual circumstances may vary. You can search not only through the “web” in general, but specifically for images, shopping, YouTube or news. Language choices are plentiful for any geotargeting you may be doing.
In this hypothetical example, I put “star wars” as my core search term. Maybe you run a Star Wars blog, so it’s definitely in your best interest to stay on top of what Star Wars fans are looking for. In this example, Ubersuggest returned a total of 361 keywords. The top few are listed at the top with the rest organized in alphabetical order.
For any one of these keywords, you can click on the downward-pointing arrow next to it to bring up a menu where you can search for that term in Google (to see what your competition is doing), review the Google Trends information (so you look into seasonality or if the term is getting more or less popular over time), and expand the keyword.
If you choose to expand the keyword, you effectively run the Ubersuggest search tool on this more specific keyword phrase.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by such a long list of keywords and want a more general overview, the word cloud function is a good option. Just like a tag cloud on your blog, this will bring up the terms that appear most often in the list of keywords. Bigger words mean they appear more often.
In this Star Wars example, it looks pretty obvious that fans are searching for the cast of the movies (and TV shows, etc.). Looking around, it might also be worthwhile to look into LEGO, quotes, date (release date?), xbox, trailers, and figures, for example.
You’re not restricted to reviewing your keywords solely on Ubersuggest. There is the option to export the list as a CSV file for easy reference or as plain text that you can then copy into your solution of choice. Maybe you maintain a note in Google Keep or you have a document in Google Drive.
If you don’t want all 300+ keywords in this scenario, you’ll notice that there are checkboxes next to each suggested keyword. Tick the ones you want to keep in the “Keywords found” tab and they’ll all be listed under the “Keywords selected” tab. From there, you can do the same CSV or plain text export.
This tool is not exhaustive and it should not be your only source of information, but I’ve found that Ubersuggest is a great place to start a brainstorming session and it can reveal opportunities that you may have missed otherwise.