The Blank Spreadsheet of Doom
You know the feeling.
You've got a fresh spreadsheet. Column A says "Keyword." Column B says "Volume." And every cell below is... empty.
Your brain is empty too.
stares at cursor blinking
Don't worry. After 20+ years and 500+ campaigns, we've cracked this. Here are 7 techniques that actually work.
1. The Customer Language Audit
Go read your last 50 customer support tickets. Or sales call transcripts. Or email inquiries.
Highlight every phrase where someone describes their problem.
Those phrases? Those are keywords. Real ones. Not made-up-by-a-marketer ones.
2. The Wikipedia Rabbit Hole
Go to Wikipedia. Find your industry page. Look at the table of contents.
Every heading and sub-heading is a potential keyword cluster. Wikipedia has already organized human knowledge for you.
Use it.
3. The Amazon Review Mine
Find books in your niche on Amazon. Read the 3-star reviews (not 5-star, not 1-star).
3-star reviews contain the most nuanced language. "I wished this book covered..." is basically someone telling you what to write about for SEO.
4. The Alphabet Soup Method
Type your seed keyword into Google followed by each letter of the alphabet.
"keyword research a..." "keyword research b..." all the way through Z.
Tedious? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
5. The Forum Crawl
Find forums, Reddit threads, and Quora questions in your niche. The questions people ask ARE the keywords.
"How do I..." = informational keyword.
"Best tool for..." = commercial keyword.
"Where to buy..." = transactional keyword.
6. The Competitor Content Scan
Pull up your top 3 competitors. Look at their blog categories, product pages, and navigation menus.
Each item is a keyword they've already validated. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. AnswerThePublic is another brilliant tool that visualises question-based keyword ideas around any seed.
7. The Internal Search Data
If your site has a search bar, check what people are searching for ON your site.
This is pure gold. These people are already on your website telling you what they want.
And you're probably ignoring it.
Put It All Together
Brainstorming is step one. The real magic happens when you validate, group, and map those keywords to pages.
That's exactly what SEO Checkup helps you do. 113 tasks across 4 checklists. Keyword research included.
Free. No credit card required. Set up in 30 seconds flat.