Video Transcript: Keyword Planning

It's no secret that keyword research is the most important part of any SEO  campaign. Keywords determine your content, your competition, even your  customers. But how can you find high volume, profitable keywords that your  competition doesn't know about without needing weeks of research or expensive keyword research software? I'm Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, the place  where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic. And in this video, I'm  going to show you five of my all time favorite keyword research strategies for  finding underground keyword opportunities that your competition doesn't know  about. Keep watching. It turns out that most people go about keyword research  the complete wrong way. What am I talking about? Well, when most people start off their keyword research process, they fire up the good old Google Keyword  Planner. But believe it or not, the Google Keyword Planner is one of the last  places you want to look for awesome keyword ideas for your business. And the  reason I say that is because there's two huge problems with the Google  Keyword Planner, the first one is that it tends to give you very close variations of the keyword that you put into it. So for example, if you put the keyword weight  loss into the planner, it spits out really close variations like weight loss tips and  weight loss strategies. It doesn't give you intelligent related keywords like  nutrition or exercise or things like that. The other problem is it tends to give the  same exact keywords to pretty much everybody, including your competition. So  in order to find keywords that are profitable and your competition doesn't know  about you, need to step outside of the Google Keyword Planner and use one of  the five strategies that I'm going to outline for you in this video. So let's start off  with one of my all time favorite keyword research, gold mines, forums. Now I'll  admit forums are a little bit old school, but where else can you find a place  where your target audience hangs out and has discussions 24/7? So in order to  use forums, you want to head over to a forum and look at threads that people  have started, and usually when someone starts a thread in a forum, it means  that they don't know the answer to the question, or they're having a problem that they can't find a solution to online. And these are the same types of words and  phrases that they use when they head over to Google and use Google search,  so they're great keywords for you to put into the Google Keyword Planner to drill down specifics like monthly search volume and cost per click. So next up, we  have Wikipedia, one of the most underutilized keyword research resources  online. Where else can you find topics that are curated by 1000s of experts and  organized into neat little categories to use Wikipedia for keyword research? Just head over to Wikipedia and enter a broad keyword related to your niche. So for  example, let's say that you're a personal trainer. You'd head over to Wikipedia  and put in a broad keyword like fitness. And then when you look at that  Wikipedia entry, take a look at the contents on that page. Each of the contents  are basically seed keywords that you can put into the Google Keyword Planner  to see the search volume and also to generate new keyword idea. So the next 

strategy is a little bit weird. It's a way to use Google to find keyword ideas  without using the Google Keyword Planner. So there's this little area at the  bottom of Google search results that you may not have even noticed, and it's  one of the best places to find new keyword ideas. It's called searches related to  and searches related to is basically Google's way of showing you thematically  related keywords to the keyword that you put in it. So to use searches related to  just enter a keyword related to your niche, like, again, if you're a personal  trainer, you can put something like fitness, scroll down to the bottom of the page  and look at searches related to a lot of times these are keywords that the  Google Keyword Planner will never show you, and sometimes there are close  variations to the keyword put in there, but a lot of times they're more like  keywords that are related, but are something that's a little bit tangentially related. So it's something that the Google Keyword Planner would never, ever show you, believe it or not, Amazon is one of my all time favorite keyword research  websites. So you're probably wondering, how do you use Amazon for keyword  research? Well, just head over to Amazon, enter a keyword in the book section  and find a popular book in your niche. Then click on look inside, and this will  show you the table of contents of that book. And basically each chapter within  the table of contents are great keyword ideas in and of themselves, and they're  also great seed keywords that you can put into the Google Keyword Planner to  find some close variations. So the four strategies that I've showed you so far are great, but I think you'll agree that I've saved the best for last, last up we have the holy grail of keyword research, quora.com now if you're not familiar with it,  quora.com is basically like Yahoo Answers, except the answers are actually  useful. And another feature that has really nice is that when you search for a  keyword in Quora, it shows you the most popular questions, which basically  means things that people are interested in, in other words, keywords that people search for in Google. So just head over to quora.com and put in a keyword  related to your niche, and you can find questions and answers. So you actually  want to look at the core. Questions. Find keywords that come up again and  again, put those into the Google Keyword Planner, and you can also read the  threads themselves to see if there are any follow up questions which are also  potentially really great keyword ideas. Are you looking for more insanely  practical SEO guides, just like this one? Then subscribe to my YouTube channel right now, or, better yet, head over to backlinko.com and sign up for the  newsletter where I share my very best marketing tips, strategies and case  studies.