If you’re doing keyword research, sometimes it can be really tough to find a good keyword to start with. Some industries are really competitive and others it’s very hard to find a keyword that has enough searches done to make it worth targeting.
Whatever the case, one tip is that you can find some keyword ideas in your Google Analytics. (If you don’t use Google Analytics to track your site’s visitor information, other software will work too.)
Log into Google Analytics and go to Traffic Sources -> Search -> Organic. (If you get a lot of searches, you’ll probably want to change “Show rows” to 250 or something higher so you can see a ton of results at once.)
You can comb the incoming search terms used to find you to find interesting terms or to give you ideas. The idea here is that there may be some terms you hadn’t really thought of that your site is already being ranked for. They may be high-quality terms that you can increase your search rankings on. For instance:
What I do is make a list of keyword phrases from Google Analytics, then tweak them with variations. I.E. if I found “bike shops in Ohio” I might add “bike shops ohio” and “Ohio bike shops” to my list. Then head over to the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool and plug in 5 terms at a time there. I usually look for something under 40-45% difficulty with decent traffic. Sometimes you can find some gems in the 20-30% range that you know you can rank for pretty quickly, like within a week or two. The big bonus here is that you’re obviously already ranking for this term, you just need to do better at it!
There are many ways of brainstorming keywords and otherwise doing keyword research for SEO, but combing your Google Analytics is a very helpful method!
