Search engine optimization algorithms are always changing and what worked last month, or even last week, may not work today in the world of SEO. If you don’t have several hours a week to devote to studying the changes, how can you possibly keep up? Instead of trying to decide where to place your keywords on your webpage or in your article, you may just have better luck by improving your keyword research itself.

Keyword research is all about trying to determine what keywords people are actually using to search for your niche. In order to stay ahead of the competition, you need to dig a little deeper than ordinary keyword research. Think outside the box and get inside your customer’s head. Get away from using the keywords you think they are using and start thinking the way they are thinking.

What is going on in the lives of your customers? This will help you figure out how they are searching for you online. For example, if you are selling pet care products, how do people look for you online? Do they type in “retractable dog leash” or do they type in “self-winding dog leash?” Maybe they look for “dog leash that won’t get tangled” or “long dog leash that winds itself up.” The point is, just because the first words that come into your thinking are “retractable dog leash” it doesn’t mean the parent who has just untied a jumbled dog leash for the 15th time this week is thinking “retractable” when she sits down in frustration at her laptop.

The problem in keyword research is you can be stuck in a mindset of how you think your customers are trying to find you. Then no matter how often you sit down at your keyword tool, you think from that same mindset – and wind up with the same results. When you take the time to look at things differently, you can think from a new viewpoint and start coming up with different keyword ideas- ideas that embody the frustrations or problems your products solve for your customers.

Instead of chasing the SEO algorithms and trying to figure out what the guys and gals at Google are going to do next, try switching up the way you think about keyword research to see if you can come up with some new keywords. When you find the keywords your customers use, you can make much faster gains on your competitors than you ever imagined.

There is a lot more to optimizing your website and articles than how many times you use a keyword or where you place it in a sentence. Knowing how people really think is the real key to your research.