How Quality Newspapers Can Be A Rich Source Of Keyword Ideas by Ken McGaffin, 25 June 2008
Ken McGaffin will be talking on Business Technology Radio (available for download from Monday 30 June 2008), about how to start your keyword research offline by reading the newspaper and mind mapping. Listen to the show and Ken writes about his ideas here...
Starting a keyword project can be difficult. Where do you start? How can you be sure that you’ve thought of all the things you should. I’ll talk about how small businesses can get comprehensive keyword ideas from a rich source that’s virtually free – top quality newspaper articles.
As examples, I’ll use two articles - one from the US:
The Showhouse That Sustainability Built
... and one from the UK:
The process I use is a simple mind map technique. Start with a blank piece of paper and as you read through the article, jot down important ideas or words. Link them together as you write. In the article on sustainability, for example, I quickly collected about 30 ideas. Once I’ve got them down, I’ll edit and re-draw the mind map. I’ve now got a really good set of seed keywords (remember those are keywords that you use at the very start of your research).
So if I was planning a website on 'sustainable building', I’d search on Google News until I found something interesting like this one from the New York Times –
Some of the ideas gleaned from this included:
- Sustainable building
- Environmental responsibility
- Building a green home
- Zero energy design
- Renewable energy
- Carbon footprints
- Solar power
- Wind power ... and so on.
The beauty of this technique is that the journalist has done a ton of research in writing a very informative article and I can use it to trigger important ideas in my head.
Another idea comes from the Guardian Newspaper in the UK. Everybody is feeling the credit crunch at the moment and many businesses and consumers must be thinking of ways that they can reduce costs.
The Guardian has a fantastic collection of free guides on seven areas of saving money. If you want ideas for how your customers can use your products to save money – probably a clever strategy at the moment – then these online guides can bring you a wealth of keyword ideas.
Again, once you’ve got your seed lists, Wordtracker can help you expand these ideas into hundreds and even thousands of keywords. You can start to find out how on our free keywords tool or test the power of the full version of Wordtracker with a 7-day Free Trial.
About Ken McGaffin
Ken McGaffin is an experienced internet marketing consultant. He has worked for major pharmaceutical companies, advertising agencies, government bodies and non-profit organizations.