Key takeaways
- Keyword research isn’t about finding the highest-volume keywords. It’s about finding keywords that are relevant to your business, winnable and likely to convert.
- The most reliable way to judge search intent is to look at the Google search results page (SERP) itself.
- New sites should start with low-difficulty long-tail keywords and build authority through topic clusters.
Google processes more than 8.5 billion searches every day. A good share of those searchers are looking for exactly what you offer. The question is: what words are they typing?
That’s the question keyword research answers. Across the 300+ websites we’ve worked with, almost every site that “published lots of content but got no traffic” had the same problem: they picked the wrong keywords. Either nobody was searching for them, or they had no realistic chance of ranking.
In this guide, you’ll learn the keyword research process we’ve used internally for years.
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process of discovering, analyzing and selecting the search terms your target audience uses, so you can find keywords worth creating content for and competing on.
Good keyword research answers four questions:
- What words does your audience use to search for your product or topic?
- How many people search for those words each month?
- What kind of content do those searchers want?
- How much effort will it take to reach page one of Google?
Why keyword research matters for SEO
You can write the best article in the world, but if nobody is searching for the topic, it won’t get any search traffic.
The first rule of SEO: confirm people are searching before you decide what to write.
Here’s a real example. Before changing its keyword strategy, an industrial equipment website had published 120 articles and was getting about 800 organic visits a month. After re-planning its content with the process in this guide, it grew to 23,000 monthly visits within 6 months, and inquiries went up 4x.
How to do keyword research (in 6 steps)
Here’s the full keyword research process. We recommend opening a spreadsheet and following along.
Step 1: Find your seed keywords
Seed keywords are the basic terms that describe your business, products or industry. They’re usually just one or two words. For example, if you sell outdoor camping gear, your seed keywords might be:
camping tentsleeping bagcamping gear
Step 2: Expand your list with tools
Plug your seed keywords into a keyword tool and you’ll get hundreds or thousands of related ideas. Common data sources include:
- Google Autocomplete: type a seed keyword into the search box and note the suggestions.
- People Also Ask: a goldmine for question-based keywords.
- Google Search Console: see the queries your site already gets impressions for.
- Competitor analysis: use an SEO tool to see which keywords your competitors’ pages rank for.
Step 3: Identify search intent
Search intent is the real goal behind a search. Google’s core job is to satisfy that intent, so if your content doesn’t match it, you’re very unlikely to rank.
| Intent type | Searcher’s goal | Example keyword | Best content type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Informational | Learn something | how to choose a tent | Tutorials, guides |
| Navigational | Reach a specific site | coleman official site | Brand homepage |
| Commercial | Compare before buying | best camping tents 2026 | Reviews, comparisons |
| Transactional | Buy now | buy 4 person tent | Product & category pages |
Step 4: Assess keyword difficulty
Keyword Difficulty (KD) estimates how hard it is to rank on Google’s first page for a keyword. Most SEO tools score it from 0 to 100, based mainly on the number and quality of backlinks pointing to the ranking pages.
But don’t rely on the score alone. When you review the SERP manually, check:
- Are all top-10 results from big, high-authority websites?
- Do those pages have obvious content weaknesses?
- Are sites of a similar size to yours ranking?
Step 5: Estimate traffic potential
Search volume isn’t the same as the traffic you’ll get. A page that ranks #1 usually ranks for hundreds of related keywords too, so its real traffic is often far higher than the main keyword’s volume.
To estimate traffic potential, look at how much total traffic the current #1 page gets. That’s much more accurate than looking at one keyword’s search volume.
Step 6: Prioritize your keywords
Finally, score and rank your keywords by business value, difficulty and traffic potential. Here’s a simplified prioritization table:
| Keyword | Monthly volume | KD | Business value | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| best camping tents | 74,000 | 68 | High | Medium |
| 4 person tent waterproof | 3,600 | 12 | High | High |
| how to set up a tent | 12,100 | 21 | Medium | High |
| tent history | 880 | 5 | Low | Low |
Get our free keyword research template
A complete spreadsheet for collecting keywords, tagging intent, assessing difficulty and scoring priority. Just plug in your data.
4 common keyword research mistakes
- Chasing search volume only: high volume usually means high competition, which new sites rarely win.
- Ignoring search intent: an informational article for a transactional keyword almost never ranks.
- One keyword per page: keywords with the same meaning should be covered by one page, or your pages will compete with each other.
- Set and forget: search trends change, so review keyword performance every quarter.
FAQs
Final thoughts
Keyword research isn’t a one-off task. It’s a foundational skill that runs through all of your SEO work. Remember the process: seed keywords → expand → intent → difficulty → traffic potential → priority, and keep iterating as you go.
Got questions? Drop us an email, or keep learning with our complete guide to search intent.
