If you are using the popular Overture inventory or any of the many tools that mine it for your keyword research, you could be severely limiting your website or PPC traffic, and negatively impacting your potential sales.

The Overture inventory has always been a staple source of words and phrases for pay per click (PPC) advertisers and website builders alike, but it suffers from a very big problem – it’s one-dimensional.

If you search the inventory for a phrase like ‘used cars’, you will get back lots of results, but they will all contain the seed phrase ‘used cars’. That means it’s up to you to think of all the possible seed phrases that a web surfer might use in a search engine when looking for your product or service.

Thinking up seed phrases is not particularly difficult, of course, but can you be sure you'll get all the possibilities? People are very different, and they search in different ways, so it stands to reason that everyone will think of slightly different seed phrases to search on.

So what's the answer? Suprisingly perhaps, there is a solution right on your doorstep - your competitors! Websites targeting the same niche as you, that rank highly

The more sites you examine, the wider the range of words you will find. Obviously this takes time (unless you use a utility to do it for you, such as Keyword Spider from http://www.Keyword-Toolkit.com), but it's time well spent because it will put you a step ahead of your competitors.

Once you have your new seed keywords, you can plug them into the Overture inventory, or one of the many tools that mine it, and build hundreds or thousands of new phrases. Using this combination technique you will be able to outgun your competitors and find some real hidden gem keywords in the process.

About The Author

Henry Eldridge-Doyle is an internet marketer, and developer at the keyword research specialist website http://www.Keyword-Toolkit.com.