At Google’s Search On event in October last year, Prabhakar Raghavan explained that 15% of daily queries[1] are ones that have never been searched before. If we take the latest figures from Internet Live Stats[2], which state 3.5 billion queries are searched every day, that means that 525 million of those queries are brand new.
That is a huge number of opportunities waiting to be identified and worked into strategies, optimization, and content plans. The trouble is, all of the usual keyword research tools are, at best, a month behind with the data they can provide. Even then, the volumes they report need to be taken with a grain of salt – you’re telling me there are only 140 searches per month for “women’s discount designer clothing”? – and if you work in B2B industries, those searches are generally much smaller volumes to begin with.
So, we know there are huge amounts of searches available, with more and more being added every day, but without the data to see volumes, how do we know what we should be working into strategies? And how do we find these opportunities in the first place?
Finding the opportunities
The usual tools we turn to aren’t going to be much use for keywords and topics that haven’t been searched in volume previously. So, we need to get a little creative — both in where we look, and in how we identify the potential of queries in order to start prioritizing and working them into strategies. This means doing things like:
- Mining People Also Ask
- Scraping autosuggest
- Drilling into related keyword themes
Mining People Also Ask
People Also Ask is a great place to start looking for new keywords, and tends to be more up to date