Keyword research can take forever if you do it the wrong way.

I’ve seen people get bogged down in keyword research for what seems like forever.

They build up gigantic lists of keywords. But for what purpose?

No single person is going to write 10,000 pages – one per keyword on some of those mega lists.

I much prefer to use shortcuts for my keyword research, pick just one phrase, write an article or a blog post on and then go back to find another keyword…

That’s how I’ve been working for quite a few years now and I find it a lot less daunting than looking at a list that scrolls off the end of the page.

It has the added advantage that I’m not faced with a list of keywords that enthused me at the time but are now either out of date (that happens quite a bit in the internet marketing world as it moves stupidly fast) or just don’t appeal to me at the time.

The keyword then gets skipped and probably never looked at again, even if it’s something that would be good to write about if I was in a slightly different frame of mind.

Which is a long way of saying that I go for a much more instant approach to my keyword research and I think you’ll benefit from the shortcut methods I use as well.

I tend to use the suggestions that come up as you type in Google.

I start with a fairly broad keyword – it could be internet marketing for instance.

And then I look at the suggestions that come up.

So, when I just checked that, “internet marketing strategies” was one of the ten suggestions.

I then chose that and “drilled down” faster (in other words, I typed a space at the end of the phrase and looked at the next bunch of suggestions).

So the next phrase that took my eye was “internet marketing strategies small business”.

That’s almost a page title in itself – if I was to write about it (and I probably will) then I’d change it to “internet marketing strategies for small business”.

Because the word “for” helps the title make sense and it’s so common Google will ignore it in its calculations of where the page should show up.

And that’s it.

Keyword research done.

If the phrase comes up in the suggestions, people are searching for it.

Regardless of whether the keyword tools show that or not – the keyword tools are historic and essentially out of date.

And at the levels of traffic we’re talking about here (pretty low) the keyword tools are basically just guessing anyway.

But there are definitely searches – I’ve proved this to myself time and time again. Even when the keyword tools suggest no-one is searching for the phrase.

Then just write about the phrase you’ve found.

Keyword research really can be that simple if you let it!

If that’s too simple, there are other ways that are almost as simple that you can check out here.