5 Modern Keyword Research Methods to Uncover Hidden Gems (1)

All content campaigns begin with the same thing:

keyword research.

And there's a reason for this. Targeting keywords will lead to long-term and, possibly, short-term organic search traffic for your website.

The bad news is that 80% of SEOs and marketers do keyword research wrong.

They plug in a main keyword into Google's Keyword Planner, download the results, and then start sorting through them in a spreadsheet. But here's the thing: literally thousands of other marketers and SEOs have already searched that exact same keyword. Unless you're very lucky, you won't find anything resembling a low-competition keyword to target. Now, if you have a site with the authority of Quick Sprout, that's not a big deal. But if you're working with a less authoritative domain, or a brand new one, you need to find realistic keywords to rank for. The good news is that the keyword planner only shows a very small portion of keywords you can target.

If you can find “hidden” keywords that have a decent search volume, but less competition, your organic search traffic will grow rapidly.

Download this worksheet of 5 modern keyword research methods to uncover hidden gems.

I'm going to walk you through 5 modern keyword research methods that you can use to uncover keywords that haven't been targeted by hundreds or thousands of your competitors. Understand what keyword research really is Keyword research is an art, not a science.

While there are some good tools out there, they should be the start of your research, not the end.

Most SEOs use keyword research to figure out how much search traffic they could potentially attract for free.

Experienced SEOs use keyword research to understand their readers.

Keywords, and their search volumes, tell you a few things:

What your audience's main problems are - if 5,000 people are searching for a particular keyword, it shows that it's a common and important problem in your niche. Create your content around the most popular problems. The language they use - people describe problems in different ways. If you can understand which words your reader uses to describe problems, you can write more compelling content. Which topics are becoming more important or less important over time - as niches evolve, keywords gain and lose popularity. Good keyword research will help you identify which searches are becoming more common so that you can create more content around those. The methods in this post aren't meant to help you find basic keyword phrases like “best toaster.” They are meant to help you understand what's important to your reader and help you create areader persona. Once you understand how your reader searches for help, you'll be able to find untapped keywords that are perfect to target. Method #1 – Students are your best audience

You do online marketing to sell something.

Most often, it's knowledge. Not everyone will pay for knowledge; many are happy to try to soak up everything for free.

But your most valuable readers are those that know that paying for high quality training is worth it. They get the highest chance of success and will save a lot of time as well.

This ideal type of reader mainly hangs out in a few different places:

Large e-commerce stores - they buy books and audiobooks from marketplaces like Amazon Blogs - they follow influencers in a niche and buy training courses directly from them Education marketplaces - the demand for high quality online training is rising fast. Sites like Udemy and Skillshare sell thousands of courses to eager students. With this method, we're looking at the third location listed above. Users of Udemy are highly motivated learners and are ready to pay significant amounts for good training.

Even though you're not selling anything yet, you want to create content around keywords that will attract this audience. That way, when you are ready to sell, you have a highly receptive audience.

There are two main ways that you can do keyword research on Udemy.

Option #1 – Look at what students already like

The top courses in each category on Udemy have a few important things in common.

First, they are created by experts in a niche. These are the people who have been writing and teaching for years, so they know the language and phrases that the audience typically uses.

Secondly, we can sort courses by popularity. By looking at the most popular courses, we can see all of the most taken courses. What this means for our keyword research is that the course participants relate strongly to the copy for the course. We can generate keyword ideas from these sales pages.

Let's go through this process step by step. First, click on “browse courses” after you have created an account or logged in (free).

This will bring up a menu on the left side with all the different categories of courses:

In this post, I'll use a marketing blog as an example site to conduct keyword research. So, from the list above, I would choose the “Marketing” category.

Once you pick a main category, you'll get a list of featured courses. You can choose to drill down a bit more. I could pick digital marketing, SEO, or social media marketing if my blog had a more specific audience:

Whether or not you pick a sub-category, the courses you see aren't necessarily the most popular courses, so we don't want to look at them. Instead, pick “All Courses” from the top menu, and change the “sort by” option to “popularity” on the next page:

You'll notice that you have additional filtering options on the side. The most interesting option to me is “level,” which describes the difficulty of a course. If I created content for beginner marketers on my blog, I would want to look at the most popular courses for beginners.

But if I wanted to create content for experts, I'd want to filter the results down to “expert” level courses. As audiences get more experienced and advanced, they typically use different keywords to describe their problems.

It's important because you don't want to create content that solves a problem that experts have using the language a beginner would use. Your content won't attract any expert marketers, and even if it did, they wouldn't be impressed by your writing (i.e., it would not resonate with them). Once you've filtered down the courses to only the top courses your audience would be interested in, we can finally find some keywords. Here's the start of the course description for the first top course I chose: You'll notice that the author already bolded most of the keyword phrases important to this audience. He knows the phrases potential students are looking for (from years of experience) and makes them stand out.

Not all course authors will do this, but this is an area where you can find several keywords.

At this point, you want to start recording your keywords. You may directly target them later, or you may use them to generate additional keyword ideas to target. For now, just start a spreadsheet with them.

Note that you don't have to copy them down exactly as they appear. For example, I doubt that anyone is searching for “how to attract ultra targeted traffic.” But a phrase such as “how to attract targeted traffic” is likely a fairly common one.

Once you've finished extracting keywords from the course description, scroll down to the “curriculum.” It has a list of each “lecture” in the course. These will typically be on the most important (and alluring) topics for potential customers:

From these first three sections, I would add the following keywords to my spreadsheet of keywords:

What is list building Why you must build a list Tools to build a (email) list How to create a sales funnel Again, take out any word(s) that aren't going to be used very often by searchers. What I just showed you was part of the sales page for a single course. You can often generate dozens of quality keyword ideas for your list from a single course. Go through as many courses as you like until you start seeing too many duplicate keyword ideas.

Option #2 – Look at what students are searching for

Any large website that sells something typically has autocomplete suggestions because having this feature usually increases conversions.

Udemy is one of those sites that provide suggestions in its search bar.

When you start typing a word, it will show you the most searched terms containing what you've typed so far: I would write down all of these keyword suggestions on my spreadsheet for later. These are very useful because they are already ranked from most searched to least searched.

Finally, don't just stop with your main keyword. If you start typing in any of those suggestions, you may be able to get more suggestions.

For example, as I started typing “marketing free,” a suggestion for “marketing freelance” came up, which would make a good addition to my list.

Method #2 – Find the questions your readers are asking The best keywords are the ones that come from your readers themselves.

Years ago, it was difficult to find them, but now you have quite a few options at your disposal.

Here are three different ways to find questions that your readers are asking so that you can extract additional keywords.

Option 1 – Faqfox: Faqfox is a handy little tool that can be used to generate content ideas or keyword ideas.

Based on a keyword you enter, the tool will scrape a list of threads on various forums and aggregators.

To start with, enter a keyword in the first text box. Then, you can either enter a forum (which may or may not work) or choose one of the pre-made categories of starter sites.

Once you click on one of the categories, URLs of relevant forums and subreddits will be loaded into the tool automatically. If you can't find an appropriate category, choose “generic,” which will search all the biggest sites such as Reddit and Yahoo Answers. Once you click the search button, you'll get a long list of thread titles (with links) relevant to your keyword. From this list, you can start picking out keyword phrases and full questions that your audience has already asked in other places:

You get a list of at least 100 threads for your keyword. Just from the results in the picture above, I would write down:

Which email marketing service should I use My Gmail email is going to junk folders Video marketing platform How to get a job in advertising How to take over a webmastering job Free online marketing tools All of these are potential keywords to target in future content.

Option 2 – Scrape a forum

A tool like Faqfox covers all the biggest forums and Q&A sites—but not all of them. If you find a forum in your niche, you can look at the threads just like we did above to extract keywords for your list.

In addition, you can learn more about the kind of language your readers use.

To do so, we're going to copy thread titles and then feed them into a keyword density tool. By looking at the words and short phrases that are used most often, you will begin to see a picture of what matters most to your audience.

For example, let's say you wanted to learn more about the audience in the main Internet marketing section on Warrior Forum. First, highlight all the thread titles:

Copy and paste this into a blank spreadsheet, and then delete all the junk data:

Copy the remaining data (first column), which should be all of the thread titles.

Paste them into a free keyword density analyzer tool—just make sure you select the “text” option:

All these tools work the same, so use any you like.

Once you run the tool, you'll get a long list of single words, 2-word phrases, and 3-word phrases listed in order from most used to least used: To be honest, my results aren't great in the screenshot above. That's because I only scraped one page of forum results. Ideally, you want at least a few hundred so that trends start to become more obvious.

Still, you can learn a little bit about your audience from a brief analysis like this. For example, they likely use the word “best” instead of “top.” In addition, they are interested in “finding” answers to their problems.