When planning and researching your keywords to target for either pay per click advertising campaigns or on-page keyword focus within your content, most marketers don’t realize they are leaving a lot of potential keyword options on the table. What’s more, these alternative keywords are often less expensive to purchase or less competitive to target in the search engine ranking. Why is this? Because too many people take what keywords the various keyword tools give them to heart. There is a huge wealth of traffic to be gleaned by targeting variations of your top chosen keywords other than the crucial part which is misspellings, there are more areas to look at;

·         Acronyms - are words that are creating by using letters from a multiword phrase. For example, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. Abbreviations and slang would also fall into this category as well.

·         Hyphens - is it pay per click or pay-per-click? Again, this is a term where both variations seem to be accepted. Make sure that you are taking advantage of any hyphen versus no-hyphen in your own market.

·         Also those fun keywords that fall into multiple variations, such as BBQ, barbeque, barbecue, Bar-B-Q, Bar-b-que. Let’s hope you are using them in a PPC campaign rather than optimizing for all those variations for organic search results.

·         Synonyms - refer to two completely different keywords that either mean the same thing or are very closely related, such as soda versus pop versus soda pop. If you were a drink company, you would need to ensure you optimize for all three, since what people call it varies by region in the US not to mention worldwide.

·         Plurals - even though some might consider this the most obvious keyword variation to target. For example, you would want to use both mortgage and mortgages as well as both restaurant and restaurants. You would be missing out on a lot of traffic if you only target the singular or the plural and not the other.

Finding and researching keyword variations is something that many marketers still miss out on when selecting keywords for both organic and paid results. By utilizing the above tips for finding variations, you might discover an entire keyword set with high volume yet still low competition by your competitors for both organic search results and within the pay per click market as well.

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