Keywords Forensics - Search Terms That Others Miss

The notion of keyword research is a pillar of the SEO world. SEOs everywhere rack their brains and use sophisticated tools in an attempt to discover what keywords they should optimize for. Keyword forensics is all about thinking beyond search rankings and, instead, positioning yourself to serve specific needs of your users. On analyzing search phrases, SEOs identify a narrative about potential customers and are able to position themselves as authorities on the web within the narratives of their customers.

Keyword research considers keywords and phrases and then gathers data to draw conclusions about which are the best to focus on. Keyword forensics surveys key-phrases, as they have been input by users in an attempt to identify a user behavior. SEOs can then optimize their sites to serve consumer needs in the fields that are related, but much less competitive than the most keywords that first come to mind for a given industry.



One of the forensic tools would be the "Word Tracker" that gathers a large list of related search phrases, their volumes, their KEI and their IAAT (sites with that keyword In Anchor and Title). SEOs have a substantial amount of data at our fingertips about, say, what kind of supplies people are actually searching for on the Internet. Sort the list by descending KEI and they'll have a list of non-competitive or minimally competitive search phrases.