Brainstorming
Is your topic dying out or becoming more popular? Keyword research is one thing, but if you are going to invest in creating content and/or a product, you would like to know there is a buzz around it. These tools are also useful for uncovering the language your prospect use in talking about your niche.
Google trends
See what’s trending now on Google Trends, or whether interest in your niche is growing over time.
search.twitter.com
Search Twitter hashtags to see what’s hot, and more importantly who are the players in your niche.
tagboard
Not sure what social media network you should be on? Although it is weighted more towards Instagram and Twitter, TagBoard not only helps answer that questions, but gives you a list of hashtags to target.
Other places to check out:
- Amazon reviews
- Yahoo Answers: answers.yahoo.com
- Quora: quora.com
Digging a little deeper with Suggest Tools
Using the API to get more out of Google Suggest
I often start with the keywords from Google suggest as a quick way to determine common keywords from a “stem” term. But Google suggest doesn’t give you the full list, and copy and paste is tough with Google suggest. Someday, I’d like to build a little webpage to scrape Google suggest but in the meantime you can query the API in your browser, just replace “WordPress SEO” with your keyword (words separated by a “+”).
http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=wordpress+seo
Ubersuggest
To get an even longer list of suggested keywords try out ubersuggest.org. It not only gives you the basic suggestions, but also gives you suggestions for each letter of the alphabet added to the end of your stem keyword.
Soolve
Although Google is the 800 pound gorilla in the search space, to get a quick overview of keywords in other platforms (such as Bing, Amazon, and Wikipedia) check out Soolve. In particular looking at keyword suggestions for buy.com, ebay.com and Amazon could help uncover “buying” keywords.
keywordtool.io
Another tool that mines Google suggest is Keyword Tool. Like UberSuggest, you can search Google suggestions for country Google suggestions (for example google.de). Additionally Keyword Tool has a YouTube tab that allows you to search YouTube keyword suggestions (very handy now that there is no longer a YouTube keyword tool).
LSIKeywords
Google’s Hummingbird update last fall was all about connecting the semantic dots. The algorithm update took Google from just knowing about “strings” to knowing about “things”. Get a semantic picture of your keyword with this tool: LSIkeywords.com. You’ll get alternative words, authority names and sites associated with the topic and other contextual information that will help you shape your content strategy. Who knew there was a relationship between “vegan” and “kosher”?