Everyone knows that SEO success involves optimizing for keywords. However, most people take their keyword research missions too lightly, failing to broaden their horizons and explore their options.

If you’re using a keyword tool, your competitors are using them too. So, you need to go above and beyond—do some out of the box thinking.

And we’ve got ideas.

Reddit

Reddit is a supremely underutilized site when it comes to SEO. It might not be as popular as Facebook and Instagram, but it’s nowhere near barren either. In fact, it’s pretty populated and was visited by more than 1.5 billion people in May 2020.

Reddit users (and non-users) have called Reddit the front page of the internet for years. The site has sub-forums and communities. Like Pinterest, it has categories and related subreddits that people use to discuss a specific topic or niche. There are “up-vote” and “down-vote” options, with the most “up-voted” posts often making it to Google front pages.

You can probably already see why a place like Reddit—that has ready made niche communities in the perfect place—would be ideal for SEO. But that isn’t all.

It’s also ideal for keyword research.

Doing Keyword Research on Reddit

Let’s say you run a business that sells DVDs and Blu-rays of old movies. With a business model like that, you’re already strained when it comes to your target audience; most millennials prefer Netflix and other streaming websites.

Reddit is a good place to look for both target audience and keywords.

There’s a subreddit for movie collectors, one about old movies, one for movie suggestions, one about old movies nobody talks about anymore, and even one about old movies that you might have seen but don’t remember the name of. It’s a goldmine.

You can also use http://subreddits.org/ to go deeper. And once you’ve found enough subreddit pages, all you need to do is observe. What are people talking about? What are their concerns? Do they sound like they might be interested in your product?

To cut a long story short, you end up finding your target audience and get to know what they’re interested in—directly from them. It’s a marketer’s dream.

So let’s say, you’re checking out a subreddit on old movies, and you find one with a lot of upvotes—such as this one:

223 upvotes—that’s a lot. Notice the words that keep popping up in this thread—movies, October, Halloween—and that’s how you know what your next keyword is going to be.

Wikipedia

With more than 18 million views per month, Wikipedia is a goliath in the digital world, and almost always a first-ranker. It has 27 million registered users, and is often the go-to site for people who have discovered (or who are looking for) something.

Wikipedia is the world’s largest global knowledge repository: it’s a library that’s free to use, covers areas as diverse as quantum physics and cultural Marxism, and is easily accessible. And while Wikipedia itself doesn’t show up on the first ranks on SERPs because of keyword placement, it will have keywords you can use to boost your page right next to it.

Doing Keyword Research on Wikipedia

So let’s say someone from your target audience watches an old movie—The Bridge on the River Kwai. Movie nerds will often Google the movie after they’re done watching. And what comes up when you Google The Bridge on the River Kwai?

This:

Notice how even IMDb—a database for movies—ranks second while Wikipedia reigns supreme. Assume that your target audience has visited this page—as many will have. Read what they would have read, which is this:

You may well assume that your target audience will be looking for more “technicolor adventure epic war films,” or “war films.” And there you have it: two new keywords.

Going Deeper

If you want to indulge yourself and go deeper, run one of the new keywords you have found on Google. Let’s try “technicolor war movies.” The Wikipedia results can prop up quite a variety of keywords:

This search will give you ideas, not just for your keyword repository, but also for your business repository. What we’re trying to say is that if you haven’t stocked up on the 1997 Special Edition of Star Wars, do it now.

Related content: SEO strategy

Grow a Keyword Beanstalk from Seed Keywords

Seed keywords are succinct and usually one-word long. “Movies” or “old movies” are examples. Something like “technicolor epic war film” is a long-tail keyword—it’s more specific, more niche-oriented. And it all stems from the seed keyword.

Learn how to grow more keywords out of the few seed keywords you have to make progress in the SEO world. You may use:

• keyword explorer tool
• Keyword explorer by Ahrefs
• Keyword Magic tool by SEMrush

Use the list of keyword phrases you get from these sites to further grow your repository. But it doesn’t stop here.

Finding Topic Clusters

You’re using keywords because you’ll use them later. You’ll use them later in the hope that your target audience will search for your articles and blogs, and that your rankings will improve.

Then find out what your target audience is most willing to read by exploring keywords on the same tools. A simple search on Ahrefs or SEMrush can help you discover what the most popular articles on the web related to a certain keyword are.

A quick look at the titles of these articles will give you a good idea of what “topics” you need to write on. Thus, you are doing both: (a) writing the right articles and (b) using the right keywords.

You can also read:

• How to Boost your Site Domain Authority (DA)
• Key Elements of On-page SEO

About the Author

The author is an SEO research analyst and specialist who provides local SEO services at Searchberg. He believes that the way ahead for small businesses is out-of-the-box thinking and extensive web research.