Lest Thy Best Quest of Keyword Suggest be in Jest Unless Thy Invest Zest in an Uberfest of Ubersuggest

Keyword Research With Ubersuggest and ImportXML

Thanks to Richard Baxter – oh, whoops, Wrong Richard Baxter… (ahem)… Thanks to Richard Baxter… uhhhh… wrong again… here we go…. Thanks to Richard Baxter, I was recently turned on to Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest is a powerful keyword research tool that allows you to extract all the the “Google Suggest” searches that show up automatically, as you begin to type your query.  Just want to share one particular use I found for this tool, a little trick with ImportXML and maybe it will help some folks out.

I was doing keyword research for an informational topic. I needed to find keywords for all the things people try to quit (bad habits, like smoking etc). Not your typical product or service type keyword research, where you have something concrete and broad to start with (like ‘cars’) in which you can just drill down and get more specific as you go, adding adjectives and so forth.

This is a case of “you don’t know, what you don’t know” keyword research. I don’t know what all the things are people are trying to quit. Enter Ubersuggest. Check out the screenshot:

Ubersuggest Results for “How to Quit”

Jackpot. After entering “how to quit”, it returned literally over 200 results. And you can even click on each individual result to drill down more. And the cool thing is, since this is coming straight from Google Suggestions, you know there is decent search volume.  Let’s verify that though:

Search Volume for Top Seven Google Suggest Keywords

The only catch?  How do I get the 200+ keywords from Ubersuggest into a spreadsheet?  Enter ImportXML. I love you ImportXML. Let’s never be apart…

Putting Ubersuggest and ImportXML Together

For those still gettin’ together your ImportXML chops (like yours truly) here’s what cha do.

1. Grab Your Ubersuggest URL

2. Here’s the ImportXML Command

=importxml(A3,"//div[@id='result']//li")

3. Getting It Into Google Docs

Saweeeeet!!!  Hundreds of decent volume keywords I may have never known about.

4. Clean ‘er Up

So NEXT, what I did was get that raw list sorted and categorized. I also of course ran them all through the keyword tool to get search volume. Check ‘er out – nice and shiny:

Bad Habit Keywords Sliced, Diced and Sorted

Conclusion

Besides feeling depressed after seeing how many people in this world are addicted to something, what I ended up with was a nice list of eleven core categories of things people try to quit (according to what’s searched for most) and dozens of great long tail variations for each.  This is honestly where my excel skills fall short though (for now). I had a quick Twitter Chat with the infamous Mike King aka iPullRank and Aaron Friedman about some ideas for being able to to a “FuzzyVLookup” to quickly sort through large amounts of keywords, when you don’t know exactly what those keywords are yet.  Something to explore for later for sure!

Hope this was helpful to some, please let me know what you think, let’s get the comments going on this blog!!