How to best figure out synonymous search phrases

[Punkaj]

I'm curious about synonymous key phrases and competitive key term analysis. I have a few methods for conducting research to find what phrases Google considers synonymous but they are very time consuming.

What are some ways to figure this out?

An example would be livestock and cattle.

Are there any good ways to figure out user intent related key phrases?

For example in our niche if someone is looking to purchase something Google often delivers pages with title tags that include the term supplies.

Would it be advantageous to optimize for these types of key phrases if the competition is less or should I assume that Google groups exact match and synonym and intent match together when calculating relevancy.

Eg I can choose to target livestock or cattle on page. Livestock gets a quarter the search volume cattle gets but has half the competition. Will I be competing against the cattle sites too? If so should I just bite the bullet and target cattle?

[EGOL]

Ask the people who answer the telephone at the business office of this website.  They usually know the crazy ways that people ask for the product and the many alternative names used for them.

[mememax]

Hi Emmy,

When it comes to keyword research everything is time consuming. If you want a refined list of keywords you need to dig into it, however I find it always reliable since I structure every idea around the terms I find.

What I normally use for keyword enrichment is:

• search for my terms in google and see what kind of suggestions google gives. These are not synonyms but terms highly related, then I click into them and find new related ones
• group  my main terms and put them into google keyword tool. In that way google will give you suggestions of related terms, jsut try to expand the list as much as you can and then refine it.
• again in google keyword tool external you may look at your competitors' homepage or to the competing urls in your serps and see which keywords they have. If you find that many of them are using supplies you amy consider adding that term too, since it will be giving you more new keywords to rank for.

About what terms go for, google always tries to give to the user the best result. In that sense Google analyses the related terms, evaluate them and then it mixes them up to try achieve the best results, there are terms which are high related synonims like motorbike and motorcycle and other which are less like motorcycle and bicycle. Depending on how much you're content is, you may consider extending your content to add new related keywords, or may be you want to create totally new sections pointing to those new keywords and deliver your users there.

hope this helps!