Hi SEO folks,

I've been playing around with different approaches for the last few years when I onboard a new SEO customer and do keyword research for them for the first time in order to be able to estimate the possible potential.

Many of us certainly start with a seed keyword based on the company's core product or service and then break it down into various long-tails and thus get a first rough estimate of the expected search volume and how difficult it is likely to be TOP-5 ranking will occur (if the keyword research was conducted via tools such as AHREFs, SEMRUSH, etc.), etc. I also still use this approach to some extent, however - particularly in the last 12 months - adopted a new approach that I now use so often that I recently wrote my own Chrome extension for it. Maybe someone will find this approach just as interesting and even my Chrome Extension helpful.

And this is exactly how I do it:

I still start with the seed keyword, but not in a keyword research tool, but with the original source > Google itself. I'm particularly interested in the suggested keywords here. These are usually somewhat influenced when you are logged into a Gmail account. Here I recommend using it without login or even incognito mode.

The result (suggested keyword top left + my extension overlay bottom right):

https://imgur.com/a/LwEmQFu

So here I get a rough overview of keywords that people who enter the seed keyword are also interested in. Unfortunately, these suggested keywords CANNOT be copied. My Chrome Extension scrapes these automatically and you can copy them for free with the push of a button.

You can then determine the search volume based on the keywords and use keyword tools to find additional long tails. But I'm not doing that YET either...

In the future, I also entered each individual suggested keyword in a new search and picked out their suggested keywords. All of this manually and as you can probably imagine, extremely time-consuming!

To do this, I came up with an “algorithm” and technically implemented it in such a way that my extension simulates a type of search query for each suggested keyword (one is actually carried out in a new tab) and then scrapes the other suggested keywords here. This might sound a bit too abstract, so here is a quick screenshot of the procedure:

https://imgur.com/6mkAuYZ

Finally, I get a list with all keywords, starting from an initial seed keyword. I automatically delete duplicates so that there are fewer redundancies. This means that I only access the original/raw data from Google and primarily only receive keywords where there is a certain intent. This doesn't always have to be transactional, but there is some intentionality. The entire keywords can then be thrown into a KW research tool to get the search volume.

The Chrome Extension is intended to make “my” previously described approach to initial keyword research based on a seed keyword easier. A complete crawl usually takes no longer than 5-15 seconds, depending on the number of suggested keywords that need to be crawled.

I'm not a UX/UI designer, nor am I a full-time web developer. So for me functionality was more important than design, but I would still be happy to receive any kind of feedback. Both in terms of my approach and the implementation of the Chrome Extension.

By the way, here is the link directly to the Chrome Web Store, if you want to check out the extension by yourself:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/suggested-keywords/mndbhpkjjmhkmnmmehdiefgknndpooii

All the best! =)