Keyword Mining When Keyword Research Fails

2K has a nice post over at SEOmoz about keyword mining when Overture and Wordtracker and your other assorted keyword research tools just don’t cut it.

1) Know your industry. Make use of marketing and financial information already available on other sources. For example, the rental apartments industry in Finland is very limited and well known in terms of size and turnover.

2) A long time ago Googleguy said: “Check out your logs to see what users are typing.” I recommend the same. I study my log files on a daily basis, and each and every day I learn more and more about my industry and their interests. And yes – this information helps me to estimate and find new keywords more efficiently than any of the tools mentioned above.

3) Check out industry specific sites as well as local search engines for possible top-lists. Go to Google and try out what search “Top 50 keyword searches” on your industry/language brings up.

4) Knowing thy enemy is the first rule of practically any business. The oldest trick in the book is adapting best practises they can offer. Estimate your competitions website and find out possible keywords they aim.

5) Have you ever tried googling log file reports? A simple search phrase “Web Server Statistics for” brings up over 400,000 reports made with Analog or some other software. Limiting this search to your specific information niche should not be too hard for any professional SEO.

The most important in that list is the log file mining, IMHO. There’s gold in them logs.