Keyword Research

Keyword research is the method for finding and choosing the terms your website gets built around. It sits underneath every other decision in SEO, and it is the cheapest way to avoid producing content nobody is looking for.

Done properly it hands you three things: higher rankings on the terms that matter, more traffic, and visitors who are actually close to buying.

What keyword research gives you

Keyword research produces the overview of which terms are relevant to your business, how many people search for them, how hard the competition is, and what intention sits behind each search. When the analysis is finished you have a sheet telling you what to write about, in what order, and in what format.

The work rests on quantitative data from the search engines, combined with what you already know about your audience. The overarching term then governs how the content gets built and which pages your link campaigns should point at. Skip the analysis and three things go wrong: you miss the related long-tail searches, you discover too late that the head term is unwinnable, and you write a guide for a search where the reader wanted a product page.

What makes a keyword good

A good keyword is relevant to you, has enough searches behind it, and leads to conversions. Only when all three conditions hold do you have something to work with.

Relevance

Relevance is about you and about the visitor at the same time. For you, a term is relevant if the traffic converts and if ranking high on it matters commercially. For the visitor, it is relevant if you actually deliver what they came for. If you sell pens, wanting to rank on "pens" is natural. If you do not sell them, it is close to impossible, and reasonably so: Google has no interest in showing anything other than relevant results.

Search volume, and what weighs more

Search volume shows demand and says nothing about value. To understand what a term is worth you need four more numbers:

• CPC, cost per click, which often indicates the commercial value behind the search
• CTR, the share of searchers who actually click through
• Conversion rate, how many convert once they land
• What a conversion earns you

Plenty of teams set a floor at 100 searches a month. We do not. In a niche where the searches are few but every deal is large, a term with 30 monthly searches can be the most valuable thing you own. We have cases where the volume sits below 100 a month and a single sale covers the company's costs for months.

Long tail

Long-tail terms are more specific searches, usually with lower volume, where the visitor has come further in their process and is closer to a purchase. Length alone does not make a term long tail. Long tail means it is an extended version of a more general term, and the variants surface on their own the moment you start typing in Google. The related searches at the foot of the results page are the other shortcut: free content ideas, straight from what people are actually looking for.

The four types of search intent

Not every keyword has the same purpose, and the intention decides which format you should produce:

• Transactional. The user wants to do or buy something. Right format: product pages, category pages, landing pages.
• Informational. The user wants to know something. Right format: guides and blog posts.
• Commercial investigation. The user wants to know something before buying. Right format: comparisons, lists, "the best X for Y".
• Navigational. The user wants to find something specific, often a brand or a location.

The fastest way to establish the intention is to search and look. Google lives by showing the right format, so the content type of the top results is in practice the answer. If "pens" returns nothing but category pages, the term is transactional, and a guide will struggle to break in. The mechanics underneath are covered in our guide to search engines.

The tools you need in 2026

Four will take you a long way, and three of them are free:

• Google Keyword Planner for search volume and competition, straight from Google's own data.
• Google Trends when you want to be early on a movement, since the commercial databases refresh less often.
• Google Search Console for the terms already sending you traffic today.
• Ahrefs or Semrush for keyword explorer, competitor data and rank tracking. Ahrefs is our own first choice.

An AI chat has no access to keyword data, but it is excellent at grouping a long raw list into topics. The rest of the toolbox is covered in our guide to SEO tools.

The analysis, step by step

1. Get to know the audience

The work depends on understanding who you are writing for. Go through your marketing plan, look in Search Console and your analytics setup to understand how existing customers behave, talk to the colleagues in sales, and ask your current customers outright why they chose you. Their own phrasing often turns out to be your best keywords.

2. Build the raw list

Brainstorm broadly, but collect data as you go. For every term you want at minimum search volume and difficulty. Search "pens" in the Ahrefs keyword explorer and you can see both in one view: volume on the left, keyword difficulty next to it.

The difficulty scale runs from 1 to 100 and is built on the number and strength of the links pointing at the pages already ranking in the top ten. Repeat the process for every overarching term you are considering.

3. Organize

Put everything in one sheet and group it into overarching topics. Note the search intent per term, and which page on your site is going to own it. That last column is the most important one in the whole sheet, because it is what stops two of your own pages competing for the same search.

4. Analyze the competition

Before you lock the list, work through page one for your most important terms and ask four questions:

• How good is the competitors' content? Can you beat it, or offer an alternative that delivers more?
• Is your page more relevant to the intention? Is the user after knowledge or a product?
• How strong are their links? Here you need a tool that shows Domain Rating and the link profile.
• Can you write a sharper meta description? A line of 140-160 characters giving the reader a clear reason to pick you can lift CTR noticeably.

5. Prioritize and start

Prioritize by competition, potential profitability and volume. The dream term with high volume, low difficulty and high purchase intent has essentially been claimed everywhere, so prioritization becomes a question of resources. On a limited budget, difficulty weighs heavier than volume: position one on ten reasonable terms beats position twelve on one big one.

Then set KPIs for the work and a date for evaluation, so you know when to hold the course and when to change the plan.

Four mistakes that keep recurring

• No follow-up. A keyword analysis left untouched for two years describes a market that no longer exists.
• Keyword stuffing. Forcing terms in unnaturally does more harm than good, and the engines see through it.
• Volume before intent. Broad terms pull in visitors who do not want what you offer. Relevance and long tail almost always return more.
• Ignoring your own strength. Going after your industry's hardest terms without the domain authority to carry them is paying for work nobody will ever see.

Keywords in AI search

Keywords have not become less important because people talk to AI. They have become longer. A prompt gets phrased as a whole question with context, which makes long tail and search intent matter more than they ever did.

In practice that means three things. Build content that answers whole questions instead of matching a phrase. Cover the topic broadly enough to be the obvious source in your field. And note which of your terms already trigger an AI answer, since that changes what you can realistically expect in clicks. How this translates into a plan for the content is handled in our guide to content marketing.

Should we run the analysis?

We have completed 3,000+ SEO analyses since 2017, and keyword research is always the first step. To place the work with us, it lives in our keyword analysis delivery. To see where you stand first, a free SEO analysis is the natural place to begin.