Good day, SEO comrades! Did you have a nice Christmas? Let’s continue our series of doing keyword research to find topics of interest using a “root” illogical word to find long-tail keyword phrases we can spin content from, shall we?
Today, I plugged in “symptoms.” Don’t ask me why; it just occurred to me, that’s all. In teaching keyword research for Search Engine Academy, I try to make it interesting, and I’ve found that other than using attendees’ industry-specific phrases or words, throwing in a generic word can produce some fascinating results.
Let’s take a look at what Wordtracker has to offer us. In looking at the numbers, the first one on the left is the approximate number of searches from the last full calendar month – November 2013 – from a sampling of Google’s servers. The middle number is the number of web pages that has that phrase in either the anchor text or the title text. The last number is the Keyword Effectiveness Index, or KEI, and that tells us how easy or hard a particular phrase may be to rank for, assuming we optimize a web page, article or blog post with the phrase.
We know that “adhd” is a huge topic of interest, and anyone with a website devoted to educating worried parents and family members could certainly learn a lot from these phrases being used for in-depth articles or web pages.
Crohn’s disease is also a fairly common affliction, so anyone who needs information about this disorder could get a lot of knowledge from these keyword phrases.
Unfortunately, gallstones and gall bladder problems are also very common, but as I know from personal experience, extremely misunderstood, so anyone who would blog about this condition could get a lot of targeted traffic that needs to know information.
And, not to make light of a painful, dangerous condition, but I do know kidney health problems are also very common.
A variation of “symptoms” would be “signs and symptoms” of…fill in the blank.
I’d forgotten that many folks type in “symptoms of…” – there are a lot of ways to write up useful, educational content to help people better understand if they’ve been affected by something.
Obviously, this root word applies to web sites devoted to medical and health issues. These are just the tip of the iceberg of useful, long-tail keyword phrases that could rank well with the Google Hummingbird algorithm update.
So there you have it. I hope this will spur your creativity to do some keyword research to find in-depth topics of interest you can develop a content strategy with. Until next time, keep it safely between the ditches, my SEO warriors, umkay?
All the best,
Once you have your keywords, what do you with them? Learn ten ways to use keywords in your metadata here.