3 ways to build large keyword lists using Wordtracker's new Keywords tool Posted by Ken McGaffin on 30 June 2009

Whenever Ken McGaffin wants to create a new website or add content to an existing one, he begins with keyword research. He spells out the reasons why this is so important, and demonstrates how you can carry it out with the aid of Wordtracker's new Keywords tool.

Whenever I want to create a new website or add content to an existing one, I always start with my keyword research.

Why? There are three main reasons:

• Keyword research will tell me what people are really looking for. That means I don’t have to guess, or waste my time creating content that people aren’t looking for.
  
• If I use the keywords people are searching with to create content then I maximize the opportunity of getting search engine traffic.
  
• Keyword research will suggest which categories I should create and how important they are relative to each other.

If I don’t do my keyword research, I’m simply going to miss out on lots of business that could have been mine.

There are many different ways to approach your keyword research and which one you use depends on circumstances. I want to quickly run through three different examples to show you what’s possible. These are:

1. Starting with a single seed word and digging deep – I’m going to use an example of a website selling Celtic Culture items.
2. Starting with a single seed word and find lists of related keywords – I’m going to look at hybrid cars and use keyword research to suggest what topics I should be writing about.
3. Starting with a list of initial keywords that I’ve brainstormed – in this case, I’m going to look at developing ideas for a website on osteopathy.

Each method will bring you thousands of keywords in just minutes of work.

1. Starting with a single seed word and digging deep

Suppose I want to set up a website concentrating on Celtic Culture. I’m interested in celtic art, design, music and related stuff.

Rather than jumping straight into searches that I think I should do, I’m going to use a ‘seed’ keyword to tell me exactly what I should be researching.

A seed keyword is any short, popular keyword that is relevant to my market and on which I can build my keyword research.

We’ll start with the single seed keyword, celtic and see how the Keywords tool can help us generate thousands of keywords.

First, I’ll create a Project:

Of course, the Project is empty to start with so let’s click on ‘Find keywords’ and enter celtic into the Search box:

This gives me 1,000 keywords all of which include celtic:

I'll save the complete List as ‘celtic seed’ before continuing to work on them.

Many of these keywords will be relevant to my Celtic Culture website, for example celtic symbols and celtic designs.

Others will not be, for example, boston celtics and celtic fc.

I’m going to work through this List, pick out the ones that are relevant and expand them.

In second place on the List, I see the keyword celtic symbols with a search volume of 3,047 which is certainly relevant.

Remember that the Keywords tool gives you the exact keywords that people enter so the count for celtic symbols is for that exact phrase and it does not include counts for irish celtic symbols, celtic family symbols or any other keyword that include celtic symbols.

Wordtracker's Keywords tool allows me to expand this keyword into a List where all the keywords contain celtic symbols, what we call the ‘keyword tail’.

Just click on (search) beside the keyword. I then get a choice between ‘Search’ and ‘Search & Save’. For the moment, I’ll choose ‘Search’ and come back to the very useful ‘Search & Save’ feature in a few moments.

Here are the results:

Now I get 280 keywords each of which contains celtic symbols and have a combined count of over 9,000 Searches.

So the tool has expanded the keyword celtic symbols with a Search volume of 3,047 into a keyword tail List of 280 keywords with a combined Search volume of 9,348 – three times as many.

I can now save all this keywords as a List called 'celtic symbols':

This List now gives me lots of keywords that I can use in a 'celtic symbols' category on my website.

This process of building a keyword tail is really useful and Wordtracker can now make the process even simpler.

I mentioned the ‘Search & Save’ option earlier. This allows you to create multiple keyword tails without having to open the results of relevant keyword and then save them.

All you have to do is move down your seed List picking keywords that are relevant and use ‘Search & Save’. The Keywords tool will automatically take the keywords in the tail and save them as a List within your Project.

Here’s how. I’ll open up the seed List again:

on 'celtic seed' and the seed List reappears:

Now I work through the seed List, using the 'Search & Save' function with any keyword I find interesting. In the shot, I’m building a List of the keyword tail for ‘celtic birth signs’.

I continue working through the seed List using ‘Search & Save’ with each relevant keyword – celtic cross, celtic designs, celtic art and so on. In a matter of minutes, I’ve built up an enormous List of keywords, organized into categories.

Here’s a screenshot of what my Project now looks like:

So each of these Lists of keywords can be used to create a category on my website and each individual keyword within a List can be used for an article idea.

So from the ‘celtic jewelry’ List, I could pick out the keyword, celtic stone jewelry from Scotland and write an article about that.

Of course, creating such Lists is only the first step. I’ll want to go on and look at the additional metrics for each keyword List and then decide what I’m going to optimize on or bid for.

2. Starting with a single seed word and building Lists by finding related keywords.

In the 'celtic' Project it made sense to dig deep into the keyword tails because the results looked very promising.

But that’s not the only way to build a large List of keywords. Another way is to widen your thinking and find keywords that don’t spring immediately to mind – these are related keywords.

Suppose I want to create a website around ‘hybrid cars’. I might need to use a different technique because there won’t be the same variety in keywords that include hybrid cars.

In this case, I’d be best to find related keywords. Wordtracker will give me 300 suggestions for related keywords and again, all I have to do is use ‘Search & Save’ to build extensive keyword tail Lists quickly.

First, I enter hybrid cars and wait for the related keywords to appear:

I can scan down the List of related keywords and pick the ones I think are most relevant to my Project, for example electric cars.

A simple ‘Search & Save’ creates the List for me.

I continue and quickly build up my Project and Lists. You can see them here on my dashboard:

Again, the keyword research is suggesting categories and after that, specific pieces of content I could create. So, in my ‘hybrid cars’ category, I could create an article using the actual keyword, ‘how do hybrid cars help the environment?’.

So we’ve shown you two techniques in the ‘celtic’ and ‘hybrid cars’ examples – one digging deep and the other going wide.

If you’d like a simple way to remember this, how about making a mental note to ‘go wide and dig deep’.

3. Starting with a List of initial keywords that I’ve brainstormed

Of course, many people like to brainstorm keywords before they go near a tool.

That can be a really useful thing to do, but the Keywords tool can then enhance your brainstorming work. Here’s how.

Take the example of an osteopath setting up a website for the first time. He brainstorms a List of the initial conditions that he deals with: he uses these as a List of 12 seed keywords that he then wants to expand:

• sciatica
• plantar fasciitis
• back pain
• tennis elbow
• lower back pain
• shoulder pain
• frozen shoulder
• neck pain
• ankle sprain
• achilles tendon pain
• slipped disc
• impingement syndrome

First let’s see how many people search for each of these conditions before setting about expanding the List.

We’ll paste the List into our Search box and then choose ‘exact’.

Now we get a ‘Searches’ figure for each of the keywords.

This is a rough guide to the most popular keywords and it will be the starting point for our work so, let’s save it as a Project and List.

We’re now created our Project and the first List within it – our seed list that we’re going to expand into thousands of relevant keywords.

Let’s look at how to expand the first seed word and then show you how to do it really quickly for all 12 seed keywords.

First, let’s change the options from ‘exact’ to ‘broad’.

Now let’s look again in the results. Beside each of the keywords we see a link, (search): this is a powerful function that lets you expand your seed keyword.

Click on (search) beside sciatica:

Finally…

The three techniques I used here are just to trigger your thinking. As you become familiar with the tool, you’ll develop your own unique methods. Good luck.

To find out how you use these large keyword Lists, see Mark Nunney’s article, Why SEO for profit must target groups of keywords.

You can get a free 7-day trial of Wordtracker's Keywords tool. Try the Keywords tool for free.