Keyword Discovery: How to Identify New Keyword Opportunities

Keyword discovery is a crucial process for anybody who wants to grow their business through online advertising. It’s also essential for search engine optimization professionals, web publishers, and content producers who want to make the most of their existing content, explore new subject areas, and keep up with emerging opportunities in their industry.

There are many ways to begin your keyword discovery workflow, and WordStream’s new and improved Free Keyword Tool is an ideal first step for anyone getting started with keyword research and analysis.

WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool – Fast, Actionable Keyword Discovery

WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool is a great place to start your keyword discovery process.

To begin, just enter a keyword. Alternatively, you can enter the URL of a specific webpage to see keyword data for that page – a very handy feature if you’re hoping to see which website keywords your competitors are focusing on in their campaigns.

To further refine your results, you can also enter your industry and geographic location, both of which will help WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool to provide you with even more accurate keyword data. The costs, competition, and performance of similar keywords can vary greatly from one region to another, even for two businesses operating in the same industry, so it’s a good idea to be as specific as possible.

When you’ve entered your initial search query, you’ll see a range of keyword data. The keyword recommendations themselves can be found on the left-hand side, and each keyword has four corresponding metrics: Google Search Volume, Competition, CPC, and Opportunity Score.

• Google Search Volume: This metric represents the monthly average search volume of a given keyword on Google. As you can see in our example search above, the top keyword suggestion – “cars for sale” – has an approximate monthly search volume of 1.2 million, suggesting strong commercial intent and solid perennial interest.
• Competition: Next up is Competition, a metric that represents how competitive a given keyword is. Keywords are ranked as being of Low, Medium, or High competitiveness, allowing you to get a feel for how aggressive you’ll have to be in your bids if you’re targeting that particular keyword.
• CPC: One of the most important metrics in paid search, cost-per-click (CPC) is how much you’ll be charged every single time somebody clicks on an ad on the search engine results page that features that keyword. This lets you cross-reference benchmark keyword data to see if a keyword is trending higher than the average for that industry.
• Opportunity Score: We introduced this unique, proprietary metric to save you time. Represented on a scale of 1-10 – with one being the poorest and 10 being the best – the Opportunity Score metric lets you immediately identify the keyword opportunities that offer the greatest potential return. This, in turn, allows you to prioritize your workflow and adjust your ad spend accordingly for the greatest possible impact.

Keyword Discovery: Broaden Your Reach, Refine Your Results

Oftentimes, coming up with your base keywords can be the most difficult stage of the keyword discovery process – particularly for those new to online advertising. This is because, no matter how well you know your business, predicting how people behave online can be very challenging, even for experienced marketers. This can result in missed opportunities, such as overlooking high-volume, low-competition keywords you might not have thought of during the early stages of your keyword research, or overspending on keywords with low search volume.

Continuous keyword discovery allows you to make business decisions about your campaigns based on what people actually search for, not what you think they might search for.

Something else to consider is that keyword trends often change greatly over time. This doesn’t just apply to seasonal keywords that tend to coincide with annual events such as holidays, but also search terms that have fallen out of favor, such as branded terms for older products. For these reasons, keyword discovery should be an ongoing process, not just a first step for newcomers.

Try WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool today and see how much simpler and easier your keyword discovery workflow can be.