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Hi, I'm Sofia, and today I'm going to take you through six underrated methods to enrich your keyword lists. So the reason we're talking about this is because 15% of searches in Google every day are brand new. This means that they probably aren't going to show up in your keyword research tool straight away.

So what can you do to get ahead of the curve and make sure you're actually targeting these keywords ahead of your competitors, but also to make sure you're not missing any potential traffic that's going to pass you by otherwise? So we're going to run through six different tips now that you can use to enrich your lists and make sure you're creating comprehensive content that your target audience are actually searching for.

So the first one of these methods is to target your competitor's branded keywords. These are the keywords that have your competitor's brand name in front of them and then maybe a section after them. So a good example of this would be competitor name plus pricing, competitor name plus reviews, competitor name plus features, things like that.

These are all different things that people considering buying from your competitor are actually searching for before they buy because they want to really evaluate the tool. If you can capture some of that brand traffic, especially if your competitor is a big competitor with lots of direct traffic, then that's a great way to kind of broaden out your addressable audience. But also, maybe you can convince some competitor traffic that you are a great solution to consider too.

The next section that I'm going to go through is how you can leverage listening tools and also intelligence tools to enrich your keyword lists. So if you think of tools like social media platforms, you can look on there all the time and see what different people are searching for, what kind of recommendations people are looking for, what are they considering when they're buying, and things like that.

You can also look on tools like Reddit to see what discussions are going on, what are people saying about other competitors, what are people describing your tool as, and things like that.

But one thing I like to do is I like to use a tool called Gong, and I like to listen to all of the sales team's recordings and demos to really understand what our target audience is looking for, but also the language that they're using throughout the sales process.

So if they're talking about certain pain points in a certain way, I want to know how they're talking about those. I want to know what keywords they use to describe some of our features because it might be that they're different to some of our naming conventions. And by doing this, we're kind of broadening out what we could rank for. We could have separate pages for different variations of a keyword, for example.

But the most important thing is that we're not leaving traffic on the table, traffic that could be searching for exactly what we sell, but in a different way. And checking up on these intelligence and listening tools is a great way to make sure you're capturing that traffic and not just your competitors.

The third method is to implement structured feedback loops. So this can look quite different in different businesses. For us, we want to encourage the go-to market teams to kind of give us feedback on a regular basis in terms of what they think people would benefit from throughout the funnel. So we have a sales team and a customer success team, and we want them to be giving us constant feedback on what they think the gaps in our content are and how we can best fill those.

So something we do is we have a Notion board, and then they can add requests using a format that we've set out, and then once those requests have been approved by the content team, they move directly into our content calendar. But if you don't use Notion or you don't want to do all of that build-in, another good option would be to create a Slack channel specifically for those content ideas. Or you could have Google Docs. You could have like biweekly meetings where you discuss any feedback throughout the process. And yeah, just lots of things like that. Just giving the team repeatable opportunities to contribute to the content plan because they are the people that speak to your customers every day, so they have that untapped knowledge.

The next section we're going to talk about is how you can apply modifiers to your keywords to enrich your keyword lists. So there are lots of different modifiers, and what this will look like will depend completely on your business and your audience.

But for us, we use a few different ones. So you could modify by industry. So one example of this would be nonprofit project management software. So you can kind of add that industry there, and you can use industry-specific examples. You could refer to customers you already have in that industry, add social proof, things like that. That would all be in an industry-specific page.

But we also do the same for personas. So HR project management software, this would be an opportunity for you to talk through, again, social proof that you have from those personas, but also their really specific pain points that they have. And perhaps your content will resonate with them a lot more as a result of that.

And another example would be to modify by business size. So this is quite common. So you could have like enterprise project management software, or you could have project management software for small businesses. These are great ways, again, to make sure you're reaching more specific but smaller and higher-intent audiences.

And yeah, another one would be affordability. So cheaper alternatives to and then maybe a competitor name that could be a good one. It's just a great way to make sure, again, if you are a cheaper alternative to ClickUp or Asana, for example, you are reaching the right kind of traffic. And the best thing about these modified keywords is that they tend to be higher intent because they already know a little bit more about what they're searching for. So they're really great people to capture throughout the funnel.

And this is a similar example. So you could modify your keywords to different stages in the funnel. So if you think about what somebody at the beginning of the funnel, so like top of funnel is searching for, they usually have a lot less education around your solution than people that are ready to buy.

Perhaps somebody who is at the beginning of their buying process, or maybe they didn't even know they're about to buy yet would be searching for something like project management tips. They might be then considering, after that, project management software, because part of the advice they've been given is to implement software. As they begin to consider different software, perhaps they've seen two different names show up in that software piece. They might start to consider competitors and how they kind of compare with your brand. So that's when you might see like ClickUp versus Asana content. Just that's a bit further down the funnel in the consideration and evaluation stage.

And then as you go a little bit further, it starts to get even deeper. So they might be looking for specific features. So you could have project management software features, project management software integrations, things like that. And even further down, you could have things like how to build a business case for and then project management software. You could even have how to build a business case for different types of software or features as well if you wanted to dig even deeper.

And then even when you're right about to make that purchase and you want to really explain to people in your team what that process will look like beyond purchase, you could start searching for things like project management software implementation or migration, things like that. So these are great modifiers, again, to really address the intent of the searches as they progress through the funnel.

And then the final one that I want to speak to you about is how you can use proprietary data to enrich your keyword lists. This kind of correlates with all these ideas that we've already spoken about because you can use that data to enhance and really understand those other sections.

But the difference between this is kind of a focus on the different tools available to you or the resources.

So, for example, you could use a customer onboarding form. This might tell you the industries that they're from, the pain points they're trying to solve, their use cases, it could even tell you their geography, so you really know who you're writing for if you want to attract similar customers in the future.

You could even use your customer onboarding forms to see like what kind of templates people are intending to manage, what kind of tasks they're trying to manage in a project management software, and this will help you understand where you need to build out that content. Maybe you want to ship your own templates and things like that.

You can do similar for non-customers. So, for example, if you wanted to use Salesforce records and see what prospects are searching instead, that's another great way to capture lots of data that you won't find online, and it's super specific to your tool and the people that you are already successful searching for.

These have been my six favorite tips for enriching your keyword lists, and I've got a few additional tips that might make this process a little bit easier for you as well. So I'll run through those now.

So the first one is to get as close as possible to your product. I know this is a little bit difficult to do if you're a freelancer, for example, and you just don't have access to the product in the same way that internal teams do. But there are still lots of questions that you can ask to kind of familiarize yourself. You can even request demos of the tool or join some calls sometimes, or even try and get yourself a license to use the tool yourself.

So another tip I have would be to keep looking at the data, the data that comes from these pages or similar pages you've already shipped. This data can be used to inform future strategies. It can be used to kind of cut out keywords that you think haven't been worth your time in the past. If there are similar variations that are coming up in these lists, then you know that you don't want to prioritize them, or you can backlog them for now.

Another thing that I would recommend doing is to look beyond keyword volume sometimes and look at conversion value instead. So some of these keywords will have really low keyword volume, but the people searching for them are much more likely to buy your solution just because they are so specific about what they're wanting. So it can be easy to fall into the trap of just targeting like the high-volume, low-difficulty keywords, but sometimes you want the ones that haven't got any data, and that's why it's really important to enrich your lists as well.

And that's all. So thank you for listening to my six tips. If you want to find me on LinkedIn, my name is Sofia Tyson, and I post some other stuff about content strategy on there.

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