There are several free (and paid) keyword research tools available online that can help you build keyword lists as well as gather search data about those keywords.

You can use these keyword tools to supplement (or replace) the keyword research process I have detailed above. Ideally, you would want to combine the two approaches – use keyword research tools to get a general idea of the niche and then the manual approach described above to customize the list to your target audience.

Each of these tools will use your base keyword to generate a list of relevant phrases for that niche based onthe tool’s internal keyword database. All tools rank keywords based on estimated search popularity (number of searches the keyword gets in a certain time period) – each tool uses different methods to get to this estimate.