How to Find Hidden Keywords That You COULD be Ranking For

About a year or so ago, Grizzly casually mentioned his modus operandi when it comes to ranking for keywords.  Basically, he said that he writes long ass posts and from those posts, finds hidden keywords that he could use to boost traffic volume.  And that is pretty much all he said about that. Now, for those of us that have been doing this for awhile, we KNOW what he talking about.  But it got me to thinking.....do most marketers really get IT? Of course, the general reply I would get from asking this from most would be to keep a sharp eye on your google analytics for accidental keywords that pop up.  But that is vague and frankly, until you build trust rank, you won't be able to spot it. For instance, let's say that you accidentally are ranking 37 for one of these accidental keywords and that keyword happens to pull in roughly 1,000 queries a month.  How would you know it?  A random searcher that happens to find your page buried that deep may be the only searcher you get.  And from an analytics standpoint, one visit is typically not enough to merit research into why or how they found you, right?

It is the whole a tree falls in forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? analogy.  If you don't know that the Google is ranking you for that keyword...even if it is on the 4th or 5th page, it may as well NOT exist.

Now, I am not a mind reader as far as what Grizzly meant by this but I do know how I find hidden keywords for my pages.  And I am going to show you how.  For the sake of simplicity, I am going to use just one page, that happens to currently rank #8 for a keyword that gets almost 10,000 searches a month.  It also ranks within the top 40 for 11 other keywords.....

The keywords had to be blacked out because I know out of the 10 readers I get for this blog, probably half of you knuckleheads would create sites to compete with me (and who would blame you....I would be giving you some sweet keywords)

The image above shows traffic volume for these hidden keywords as well as broad competition and KEI, which I rarely use as a way to define viability. The highlighted columns are the keywords that I am ranking somewhere for on this page.  My main keyword gets 9,900 queries per month and consists of 2 words.  The one word keyword is the general word (which I happen to be ranking 15 for). Now, let's pretend for a second that my main keyword was ranking higher in the listings.  Let's pretend that this was a much more competitive market than it is.  

You would have 2 strategies:

1. Build links for your main keyword and slowly move up the SERPS....
2. Modify your content to highlight the other 12 keywords that you found and build links for THOSE keywords as well...

Do you see where I am going with this?

The Two Different Realities for SE Ranking

Grizzly knows that by writing long ass posts and being able to harvest enough keywords within his market, he could take something very competitive as his main keyword and while building authority and trust, cherry pick the keywords that Google deems as the most relevant. This isn't what most marketers do.  What most search engine marketers do is find one or two (or three) keywords and try to force the issue. So your choice is this:

1. Tell Google what you want to rank for (by targeted content & links)
2. Let Google tell you what it thinks are the most relevant keywords for your page.

I dunno about you, but wouldn't number 2 seem to be a better option?  Wouldn't writing a long ass post, throwing proverbial shit against the wall, and seeing what Google tells you it thinks your page is about a better option than fighting with hundreds, maybe 1000's, of other marketers who are vying for the same keyword? The thing about this frame of mind is that you start getting traffic quicker because you are only targeting the keywords that Google has decided that you are relevant for.....and you can still target your main keyword.  You just get the traffic from other related keywords while you are waiting. By the way, those numbers you see isn't from an actual website. It is from a Squidoo lens I created 3 months ago.  One page.  500 words of content (with videos and pictures).  Roughly 15 minutes of "work". Traffic potential? Assuming that I can manage to rank all 12 keywords #1 and 40% of the searchers check out my lens, I could expect traffic volumes in the 20k per month arena.  Now that ain't bad for one page, right?

So how do you discover these hidden keywords?

Through thorough and effective keyword research. -If you know how to reverse engineer websites, you simply run a keyword search using google adwords tool for your page or site in question.  Google will return a ton of keywords for you and then you start to dig into the keywords to see if your site ranks for them. -Alternatively, you could run a search for your main keyword, grab all those keywords and perform a search to see where you rank for those keywords as well. -You could also grab keywords from google's related searches and then run them through to see if there are any nuggets as well. (be warned though....if you scrape all the related searches, you will harvest 1,000's of keywords...I watched as my 800 keyword list quickly turned into 40,000 keywords). The list could go on and on but the first step is to do as thorough as a job as you can in the keyword research department. From there, you monitor your rankings. So, in a nutshell:

1. Start with keyword research.  The deeper you can dig into the market, the more data you will have, and the more "chances" you will have of figuring out what google could rank your pages for....
2. Pick a primary keyword. Write content for it.  If you aren't real familiar with the market, write a long rambling post.  If you are, pepper the content with more semantic keywords and phrases.
3. Wait a couple weeks.
4. Take all the keywords you have harvested and either manually determine if any of the keywords are ranking or automate the process with software.
5. Generate a list of things that each page is ranking for, including your primary keyword.
6. If your primary keyword is buried deep in the search, add backlinks but focus primarily on the hidden keywords for quicker traffic while you are waiting.
7. Repeat the process with each and every page you build.

The tool I use is ranktracker but there are many of these tools around.  Ranktracker is free BUT you can't save your campaigns in the free version (which is completely impractical if you are monitoring 100's of pages).  The licensed version is $97 and in my opinion is very much worth it (it is professional software used by larger companies like Audi and Disney, not clickbank shit.)

Ranktracker direct download here (free trial)

In my next newsletter, I am going to discuss in detail how I use it and show how to break down a competitor's website by reverse engineering their site and cherry picking keywords that they likely have no clue that they could be ranking for.... At any rate, that's it for this week.  Ta-ta for now.

The preceeding was an article found on LeoDimilo.com-  Original Source- Find Profitable Keywords