The Alphabet Soup Method: A Guide to Easy SEO Keyword Research [2024]

One of the toughest parts about starting a site in a new niche is having to find niche relevant keywords to build your content around.

There are plenty of tools out there that can help you find keywords, but one of the best tools is Google itself.

The Google Alphabet Soup Method was popularized by the guys at Income School with their Project 24 course. 

The basic gist is that you are using Google’s predictive search to help generate keyword ideas for a niche.

Tools like Keyword Atlas make it easy to gather an extensive list of these keyword ideas in just minutes, but I’m going to show you how to execute the Alphabet Soup Method using just Google Search and Sheets.

How Does the Alphabet Soup Method Work?

It goes something like this…

In the Google search bar type in a word or phrase followed by a letter of the alphabet.

Gather all of the autocomplete responses.

Move to the next letter and repeat until you have a spreadsheet filled with keywords directly from Google’s predictive search engine.

From experience, I can tell you that it absolutely works.

If you build content around the results you will earn the favor of Google.

It’s a free and easy way to brainstorm keyword ideas.

However, most people that use the alphabet soup method will just cycle through the alphabet from A-Z.

But why stop there?

You can get additional longtail search results by appending a letter before the word or phrase.

Additionally, you can append a letter before AND after a phrase.

How about adding multiple letters?

That works as well.

You can even add a letter to the middle of a phrase.

Try this using these phrases to find informational content topics (* represents a new letter):

• How * <keyword>
• How to * <keyword>
• How do * <keyword>
• Why do <keyword> *
• What * <keyword>
• Is * <keyword>
• Do <keyword> *
• Does a <keyword> *

Try these phrases for money content topics:

• Best <keyword> for *
• Best * for <keyword>
• Top <keyword> *
• Top 10 <keyword> *
• Best <keyword> *
• <keyword> or *
• <keyword> vs *
• <keyword> * reviews

Employing all of these added variations of the Alphabet Soup Method will generate additional longtail keyword results.

However, there will be many duplicate results shown throughout the process so you will need to remove the duplicates from your spreadsheet.

Or you can just use a tool like Keyword Atlas to quickly run every possible permutation of the Alphabet Soup Method for you, removing all duplicates, and allowing you to filter results by how relevant they are. 

In Conclusion

Now that you have a master list of keywords to target for your niche, you can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to get monthly search volume estimates and to gauge how difficult a particular keyword may be to rank on page 1 of Google.