How to do keyword research on forum sites to find great content ideas

With keyword research, the first thought that comes to mind is of free and paid tools like keyword planner, google autocomplete etc.

But these are the not the only best tools to find the most profitable keywords in your niche or market.
Niche forums, question answer sites and social sites are a great place to discover keyword ideas and topics.

Problem with automated tools

There are lots of free and paid tools out there that allow you to extract keywords from search engine sources. Popular ones include keyword planner, ubersuggest etc.

However these tools are more like machine, they just retrieve the data from the search engine’s database. They are not inaccurate, but are very limited.

All it shows you is how many times a word or certain phrase has been searched. Sure, that gives you a good idea about what people are searching for, but that’s it.

To be a successful marketer, you have to look closely to what your audience is thinking and talking about. The more you engage with your audience the more you understand their needs and eventually you find more ways to approach them. That is how a successful business goes on.

A nice place to find this information is social sites like forums, where people interact and speak out their minds.

Keyword research using tools :

Find keywords -> Check traffic potential -> Convert to topics -> Write content

Keyword research on Forums

Find popular topics -> Steal both topic and content 😀

Step 1 – Find forums in your niche/market

The first step is to find the best forum sites in your niche. With google, it takes not more than a few queries to do so. Search up for something like

“niche” forums
gardening forums
cooking forums

The results would contain forum sites. Check every individual site that comes up in the results. Get inside the site and see the categories, sub categories. Find the one that is most relevant to the topic or micro-niche you wish to target.

Step 2 – Find popular high traffic posts

Most forum sites list out discussions (also called threads) in table and columns. There is often a column that shows the number of views and number of replies.

Find discussions/topics that have high number of views and replies. Take a look at these topics. Try to figure out if these topics are useful enough to write a blog post.

These topics have most likely received a lot of traffic, and some of it might have been organic. So if you target these topics, you can receive a lot of traffic too. There is no guarantee about it, you have to try and see for yourself. But it often works.

Step 3 – Get the keywords behind those popular forum topics

This neat trick will get you some bright keyword ideas behind those popular forum topics that you discovered in the previous step. It is not a very difficult thing to do.

Open up Google keyword planner, and put in the url of the popular discussion into it. and click ‘Get ideas’.

Keyword Planner would now retrieve some very related keywords for that particular url. Download the csv file and go ahead with your analysis.

The idea behind this approach is to hunt for other potential high traffic keywords that might be related to this topic and provide us with more unique content opportunities.

And very often the keywords returned are long tail, have good traffic and are provide lots of different and unique content ideas.

Conclusion

On forums, people talk about all sorts of things about a subject or product and therefore you have the opportunity to better understand what exactly they are looking for, what problems are they facing and what are they trying to do.

Use this knowledge to develop content and meet their demands. Simply put, you just need take a look at what topics are people talking about a lot. These are popular topics and you can develop content around these to boost traffic on your site.

Later on you might be surprised to discover that some of the highest traffic posts on your site were written around topics you found on forums.