Keyword research is an essential part of any internet marketing that you do.

If you pick the wrong keyword phrases, chances are that the competition is either so fierce that you’re unlikely to get onto the first page of the results any time soon or there’s so little demand that whilst you may reach page one almost instantly, no-one is searching for the phrase you’ve chosen.

These keyword research tips are the methods I personally use to find keywords that I can target easily and that are likely to bring buyers to my pages.

Only use keyword tools as a backstop

That may sound really odd. After all, keyword tools are supposed to help you research available keywords.

The trouble is, most of them are based on the Google Keyword Tool. They may make the results look prettier or they may add extra helpful information but actually, most of the time, that’s just a hinderance.

Most keyword tools don’t think “outside the box”. For instance, I’ve just typed “weight loss” into the Google keyword tool and every single result includes those two words, in that order.

No suggestion that I might want to use “lose weight” or diet or exercise.

On top of this, the figures shown are guesstimates. But – because a computer has presented them to us – we tend to take the figures as definitive.

Which can easily lead to following the wrong direction for a while.

Instead, use what your visitors are using

Regardles of where you are in the Western world, there’s a good chance that most of your visitors use Google for their searches.

When you start typing in Google, it brings up a list of suggestions.

if you’ve got Google Instant switched on (the default option) then there will usually be 4 suggestions.

But for our keyword research, it’s worth going into the settings and choosing “Never show instant results”.

That brings the number of suggestions up to a maximum of 10, which is much more useful for keyword research.

Google knows that we’re in a rush, so it gives the suggestions as shortcuts that we can use. This means that the most popular searches are near the top of the suggestions shown – they’re not in alphabetical order.

You can also get lots of extra suggestions by moving your cursor around in the search box and typing a space.

Or you can type a letter or two at the end of your initial search – I start with “a” and work my way through the alphabet. That gave me things like “weight loss apps” and “weight loss after pregnancy” to name but just two,

Whenever I’m stuck for keyword ideas, I’ll spend a few minutes checking the Google suggestions and I’ll be overflowing with up to the minute keyword research ideas.

Scroll to the end of the first page of results

Google knows that most people don’t click on to the second page of the search results.

So before it gives you the option to click onto page 2, it normally offers a list of related searches. Which gave me the related phrases “my fitness pal” amongst lots of other suggestions.

You can drill down to long tail keywords very quickly.

And long term keywords are where buyers are lurking!

There are a lot less searches for long tail keywords but the people searching are hungry for information and more likely to pay for it.

I hope you’ve found this useful. If you’d like to comment on these keyword research tips, feel free to use the comments box below.