How to find out what customers are searching for

A lot of startups and other entrepreneurs alike are thinking about what product/service they could provide that would make people want it. Finding the answers is not that hard. In today’s digital age, there are plenty of analytic tools and software through which we can find out almost anything. So why not to take advantage of it? 

A few years ago when there was no Internet it was challenging to find answers. What cannot be said nowadays, however with a few clicks anyone with the Internet access can find everything. How to cook rice? How to paint a wall? How to fix a refrigerator? We can find the answers to all this in a few seconds. 

Just as we can find these answers, we can also find out how often people around the world or in specific countries search for specific search terms. And we can do this quite easily using a tool directly from Google called Keyword Planner.  With this tool, you can find the keywords that people are searching for and based on this data, you can decide which products/services are attractive to your potential customers and later you can create a workable strategy based on that, discover what to sell and what not to sell on the other hand. 

Google Ads Keyword Planner Source: Own processing

What are keywords and what are the types of keywords?

When it comes to keywords in search engine marketing, there are a few things you need to know. Firstly, keywords are the terms that a searcher enters into a search box, either through typed text or through a voice command converted to text by a search engine. Secondly, your keywords should be relevant to your business and target audience – otherwise you’re not going to get much traction with your campaigns. Finally, keywords can be both short-tail and long-tail – meaning they can be one word or multiple words strung together. For example, if it were this website, relevant keywords would be onlyfans finder, find people on onlyfans, onlyfans find users and similar. 

Keywords by function:

Information keywords: As a business owner, it’s important to be aware of the different types of keywords that people use when searching for products and services online. One type of keywords are those related to information seeking. People use these keywords when they are looking for specific information or help, and often start their search with an interrogative pronoun such as “what” or “which”. For this reason, such keywords tend to show up on informational pages like reviews, how-to guides, and blogs. As a business owner, you can use these keywords to your advantage by writing informative blog posts and linking them to the products that you sell. By doing so, you’ll be able to attract potential customers who are already interested in what you have. Example: How to build a gazebo, What are good hiking boots, How rain is generated. 

Service keywords: these keywords reflect the user’s demand for a product or service. They tend to be the most frequent in keyword analysis and need to be split so that the words do not cannibalise each other (one group of keywords is optimised for 2 or more pages and they take value from each other and Google doesn’t know which one to display). Example: Carpenter works, Computer repair, free OnlyFans accounts, Sports shoes. 

Location keywords: these keywords indicate where your business is located. They are important for local SEO purposes and can help you rank higher in search results for people searching for businesses in your area. Example: Hairdresser near me, Car Rental New York, Goldsmith London. 

Navigational keywords: these keywords are used to search for specific things on the website. For example, if you’re looking for the login page, you might type in “login” or “log in.”

Illustration image Source: freepik.com

Creating keyword analysis via Google Ads

Google Ads is an advertising system from Google that is used to create and manage ads. It is the most reliable tool for collecting KWs because we have raw data directly from Google with the most objective metrics. This system also includes a feature – Keyword Planner. Through this tool, you can search for keywords and when you type in your keywords, Google will throw up other keywords that it evaluates as similar and useful. This feature can be accessed through Tools and Settings —> Keyword Planner. 

Keyword Planner Source:Own processing

Next, we need to go to Discover New Keywords and type the keywords of the service/category/product, etc. for which we want to find keywords into the search engine. The maximum number of words to search for is 10, however, once the search is entered, Google itself will add other keywords to the list that it thinks are related to the KWs entered. 

Discover new keywords Source::Own processing

After entering your keywords, a table will appear with your entered keywords and Google’s recommended words as well as search volumes. This table can then either be downloaded as a .csv or saved straight into a Google Sheet.

The second option is to search for keywords by the URL you entered (Start with the site), but this option is not recommended in most cases, as this analysis will only yield keywords that are found in the URL with no other recommendations.

Such keywords then need to be scrubbed. Google will often give us a recommendation on keywords that it evaluates as suitable for our business on an algorithm and give basis. However, we don’t always need all the keywords and therefore it is important to discard any keywords that are not relevant to our business from the analysis. And we’re done! We have created a keyword analysis that we can then use for SEO optimization, PPC campaigns or we can learn what goods/services people are searching for that we don’t have and we can expand our portfolio of products or services.  

Keyword analysis is a very necessary step in any business because we can find out what services or products people are searching for or, in the opposite case, which ones they are not. There is also a number of tools for this, with Google Ads being the most popular. However, if you want to use other tools, the most popular ones include Marketing Miner, Google search console, Ahrefs, keywordtool, questionDB or answerthepublic.