Stage 4: Using Keyword Patterns, Modifiers and Combinations

Open a new Excel Workbook and name it “Keyword Patterns”. For every step below, you will be creating a separate list of terms. In this exercise you will pour over all of the keyword research we have done up until now to find every possible term that can be used to modify any keyword, each modifier will go into the appropriate list or lists. Once we have all of the lists, we will use Google’s Keyword Multiplier for all page specific keyword research moving forward.

KeywordGrouper.com offers an incredible tool for taking massive lists of keywords and helping you quickly filter the list into groups. This is a paid tool that unfortunately it only runs on PC’s, but it is definitely one of the most valuable tools that anyone tasked with keyword research could use. Watch this great video to see how KeywordGrouper works:

Take the big list of keywords that was aggregated from your competitor research and put the list through the Keyword Grouper tool. This will help give you some great insights into the different categories of keywords within your big list.

1. Establish Base Terms: You should now have an outline of your site’s Pages, Products, Categories, Sub-Categories, Niche Markets, Landing Pages, etc… This should have been done in Strategy 4, Step 1, when you created the Aggregated Sitemap. The Aggregated Sitemap should outline your entire site.


2. Keyword Intent: Early in this course we identified the 5 classes of keyword intent. Now, create 5 separate lists, one for each class of keyword intent, and as you go through all of the keyword research that has been up to this point, whenever you see a term that is appropriate for one of these 5 lists, add it to the appropriate list.
• Buy Now
• Interested Product Research
• Informational
• Local Business
• Freeloaders


3. Applications / Use Cases: As you review all of the keyword research we have created up to this point, watch for terms that describe specific applications or use cases. Be aware that different products or services have different applications and use cases. This can be handled in two ways. You could separate these into different lists of applications or use cases for each class of products and services. Or, you could just create one big list, knowing that when you multiple the terms together in Google’s Keyword Multiplier, you will be creating a lot of phrases that won’t make sense. If there are only a few, starkly different classes of products and services, then you may want to make separate lists. However, if you have lots of different classes of products and services, then I would just make one big list. Remember, after multiplying the lists together Google will give you the average monthly search volume for each phrase. So, phrases that don’t make sense will naturally get filtered out due to low monthly search volume. This tends to be the easier way to do it. However, the Google Keyword Multiplier has a limit of 1,000 terms per search, so if your lists are too big, you will have to break them up.


4. Buyer Personas / Different Roles In Use Or Purchase Process: In this stage you should make a big list of every different type of buyer persona that you are targeting. Look for terms that are both general and very specific. Once you have gone through all of the keyword research looking for terms, make sure to brainstorm, building on any patterns you see and to fill any gaps. Examples:
• Industry: List all industries
• Profession: List professions
• Position / Title: List all job titles
• Gender
• Age
• Income
• Hobbies & Interests
• Needs / Pain Points
• Goals
5. Features / Attributes: Look for terms that describe all of the features and attributes of your products and services.
6. Add Ons: Do your products and services have options, upgrades?
7. Adjectives: What terms could be used to describe your products and services?
8. Locations: Where are your products and services available?
9. Organizations: What are the organizations that matter in your industry? Both professional and consumer oriented.
10. Questions: What are the questions people are asking? What do they want/need to know? With voice search becoming more popular through mobile devices, it is critical to identify and optimize for complete questions… however, for this exercise you should make a list of verbiage that will automatically create questions like: What is, when do, why should, etc…
11. Encyclopedic exploration of the subject: Check Wikipedia for any pages related to your various topics and see how those topics are explored.
Once you have gone through all of the previous keyword research and created all of your keyword modifier lists, it is time to use the Google Keyword Multiplier to create great keyword combinations.

This tool is awesome! However, it does have two limits. The lists will only multiply in order. That means the terms in the first list will appear before the terms in the second list, etc… the terms in the second list will not appear before the terms in the first list.

Lastly, the tool will multiply all the lists that are entered. Therefore, if you enter three lists to be multiplied together, all of the results will feature terms from all three lists. If you only want two lists to be multiplied together, you can only enter those two lists. If you want to reverse the order of the words, you have to re-order the lists.

However, with all of that considered, this really is the best way to do keyword research once you have already gone through all of the fundamental exercises that we did in the first 3 strategies. Here is the step-by-step on what to do.

1. Multiply various lists together to find all possible phrases
2. Export lists and add to appropriate Thematic Groups
3. Run these lists through the Keyword Multiplier found here: Keyword Multiplier
4. Download and format the keyword ideas reports