Keyword research is the A & B of Pay Per Click marketing and search engine optimization. Often we just grab the main keyword, dump it into the keyword research tools and hope to find the golden nugget that will make us rich. That can work, but is not always the best approach because every other marketer is doing exactly the same and therefore the competition is stiff and high rankings are difficult to achieve or very expensive to maintain. There is a neat little trick, that most people are not aware of. This trick allows you to dump in your main search term and the Google search results will show the main related terms in bold text. By seeing the related terms in bold text we can then grab those and create new and better keyword combinations for our research and ultimately build keyword lists for PPC that are cheap to bid on, but still bring in high traffic. Of course the same works for SEO as it allows us fill our content with more related keywords and therefore rank for those as well.

So, how does this little trick work? Identify a couple of main keywords for your niche you are working on. The go to Google.com and search for those keywords, but put the little “~” symbol in front of the main keyword. Your search term would then be entered like this: ~hosting

This screenshot shows you the results for the search on `hosting. I marked the search term up on top and then highlighted the keywords Google marked in bold because it sees an immediate, primary relationship with the main search term. Now the search for hosting is pretty broad and generic, but do the same with something more detailed and you might find great ideas for your keyword research.