Keywords are of huge importance to any online writing. Whether you’re creating product descriptions, articles or text ads with keywords to trigger them, the words used within them are vital.
Our previous article describes How to Use Keywords in Product Titles and Descriptions but you need to know which keywords to use in the first place. This article aims to show where you can find keyword suggestions, and also their popularity. This is useful not just for your writing, but also to help understand keyword trends which may impact on your online sales.
Google Auto Complete
Have you ever entered a search term into Google and it gives you more suggestions? Google AutoComplete is a really quick and simple way to see what long tail variations are being searched for in relation to your search query.
Although this may be useful it doesn’t give any context on how popular each search term is and there’s only a limited number of suggestions so there are better ways to complete keyword research.
Google Trends
One of the easiest ways to look at the popularity of a keyword is in Google Trends. This free tool allows you to look at your selected keyword(s) either in a specific country or worldwide over a chosen period of time. This is particularly useful if you sell in one country but not another. For example if you have a pink fluffy sweater you’ll find that it would be more appropriate to call the item a jumper in GB but in the US sweater is the preferable search term so may be better to use as your keyword. As such it can help guide you towards the more popular keywords and illustrate which ones don’t have search volume.
Google Trends also enables you to monitor the trend of the keyword. For example hand sanitiser has been readily available online for years, but as more and more people searched for it due to Covid19 you can see how Google Trends illustrates this growth.
This could be useful if for example you see a prolonged drop in sales with no obvious feed or website issues. If you sell a specific item type you can look in Google Trends and it may show that this brand or item type is dipping (or increasing) in search trend volumes. This is invaluable to businesses but it’s amazing how many of our retailers haven’t used, or heard of this free, easy tool.
Adwords Keyword Planner
If you have an Adwords account, then the keyword planner is an invaluable tool in helping choose keywords. Simply navigate to ‘Tools & Settings’, ‘Planning’ and ‘Keyword Planner’.
Keyword planner enables you to see the search volume for keywords plus you can see how competitive the keywords are. It also allows you to look at alternative keywords so you aren’t limiting yourself to just one keyword variant but using long tail variants and similes.
The range of information available is shown below and you can immediately see key information for the specific keywords entered but also for keyword ideas:
There are lots of other keyword planning tools available similar to this and many sites such as semrush, ahrefs etc. have keyword tools to aid you in your keyword research.
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is another free tool although you do have limited search usage on the free account. This tool doesn’t look at individual keywords but instead you enter a keyword and it tells you the search queries users use containing this keyword.
This is especially useful if you are writing articles or blog pieces as it enables you to frame the blog piece about a searched for topic or you can contain the popular questions within the article to ensure users find it of optimal use.
Once you’ve completed your keyword research, the next step is to incorporate them in your copy and see the results for yourself on what an impact the changes can have.
