What is keyword research?
By performing keyword research, you can discover and decide which terms are essential to include in your content to meet a website’s objectives. It is the process of finding out what your target audience is actually typing into Google, so that you can build your content around real search demand instead of guesswork.
Publishing content that nobody searches for will not bring you organic traffic, no matter how well it is written. This is exactly why keyword research matters: it connects what you write to what people are already looking for.
In the old days, keyword implementation was the main task of SEO specialists. This is no longer the case, and the search engines take a very dim view of keyword stuffing. However, if you use keywords in a meaningful and natural way, they are still a significant ranking factor. Hence the importance of analyzing them in depth.
Why is keyword research crucial for SEO?
Keyword research is fundamental to SEO because you can search for two types of keywords through this process that has a direct impact on your website traffic:
- Keywords for which you want to position your site.
- And keywords that address the search queries of the people looking for what your business offers.
Another use of keyword research is to determine what topics the site’s content should cover. While researching, you can find out if your competitors are ranking for any keyword you are not.
Keyword research is so vital that it can ultimately affect the success of a business as a whole.
Keyword Research Process
Now that we know the importance of executing the keyword research, it is time to delve deeper into the steps to follow for this process:
Analyze your current keywords
In case you already have a list of keywords you want to rank for, you should start by reviewing them. If not, go directly to the next step.
Check how those terms are performing for your site. If you have a small website, there are many free tools available that you can use. However, if you require more complex research, it is better to choose a paid tool.
Use Google Search Console to determine which keywords your site is already ranking for. Create a list separating those keywords performing well from those that are not but are still valuable. You’ll have to go through this last one, following the steps below.
For a deeper view, including which of your own pages may be quietly competing for the same query, a tool like FandangoSEO’s Competitive Analysis goes further than the raw list of queries that Search Console gives you.
Set your objectives
Your keyword research efforts will be in vain if you don’t set your goals beforehand, based on the organic traffic you need for your business.
Keep in mind that these are search terms that can attract visitors, and not merely words for which the site can rank. Something as obvious as this is often overlooked.
When determining your goals, you should ask yourself specific questions such as: who your target audience is, what their needs are, what you are selling, and what your value proposition is.
Make a list of the keywords you want to work on
Based on the answers to the questions in step two and considering the business experience, the next step is to create a list containing the keywords that best match what your target audience is looking for.
Ask yourself what your potential customers would ask themselves when looking for information about your products, deciding who to buy such products from or want to buy products like yours.
To expand this list, it helps to rely on a few free tools rather than brainstorming alone:
- Google Keyword Planner: built for advertisers, but still useful for keyword ideas and rough volume ranges even if you are not running ads.
- Google Trends: good for spotting topics that are rising or declining, though it will not give you keyword level data.
- Answer The Public: surfaces the actual questions people ask around a topic, taken from autocomplete data.
- AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude: useful for fast brainstorming. A prompt such as “Suggest 15 keyword ideas related to [your topic], grouped by search intent” will give you a solid starting list within seconds. Keep in mind that these tools will not give you real search volume or difficulty data, so treat their output as a brainstorm rather than a final list.
Study your competition
The competition is one of the best resources to know which keywords to rank for, especially if they have been in the industry for an extended period. In that case, they will certainly know the keywords by which they should rank, and you may have missed some of them. Without a doubt, running a competitive analysis will provide you with a lot of useful information when it comes to choosing your keywords.
FandangoSEO’s Competitive Analysis tool is built for exactly this. It shows you which keywords your competitors rank for, and where the overlap and the gaps are with your own site.
Group your keywords into clusters
By following the previous steps, you should have a bunch of keywords from which to start. Eventually, they will help you find other interesting keywords for your site. However, although they are vital for ranking high on SERPs, optimizing them individually is not enough.
Rather than creating a separate page for every close variation of a keyword, group related terms into clusters and target each cluster with a single, more complete page. For example, “keyword clustering,” “how to cluster keywords” and “keyword grouping for SEO” are not really three different topics, they are the same intent phrased in three different ways. If you check the search results for each and see the same handful of pages ranking for all three, that is a good sign you should write one strong page instead of three thin ones.
Google has become an expert at recognizing all the terms that are related to a certain topic, so each of them opens many doors. There are also many tools that suggest topics related to a keyword. These applications scrape information from the SERP to find the most frequently used queries and searches for a given topic or keyword.
Therefore, you should create an extended list of search terms, select the priority topics, and group the rest of the words below them, listing them according to their importance.
Understand your keyword metrics
Before deciding which keywords are worth pursuing, it helps to understand what the numbers behind them actually mean.
Search volume tells you the average number of monthly searches for a keyword. Two things are worth keeping in mind. First, it is usually a 12 month average, so seasonal keywords can be misleading: a keyword that spikes every December but shows almost no searches for the rest of the year will still display a moderate “average” volume. Second, search volume is not the same as the traffic you will get. Even a number one ranking rarely captures more than a fraction of total searches.
Keyword Difficulty (KD) is an estimate of how hard a keyword is to rank for, usually based on the backlink profile of the pages currently ranking for it. It is a useful reference for prioritizing your list, but it should not be treated as the final word. Always check the actual search results too.
Cost Per Click (CPC) shows what advertisers pay per click for that keyword in paid search. It is mainly a metric for PPC campaigns, but a high CPC is also a fair signal that a keyword carries real commercial value.
Do not dismiss low volume keywords out of hand. Long tail terms bring in less traffic individually, but they are usually easier to rank for and tend to convert better, since the person searching already knows exactly what they want. A group of well chosen long tail pages can add up to meaningful traffic even if none of them look impressive on their own
Balance the opportunities of your keywords against their cost
The process ends at this step, which is not part of the keyword research itself, but it does serve to optimize the results. It is a matter of weighing the potential of the terms collected against the cost of pursuing them.
To do this well, weigh each keyword, or each cluster, against four questions:
- Relevance: does this genuinely match what your business offers?
- Volume: is there enough search demand for it to matter?
- Difficulty: can you realistically compete for it given your site’s current authority?
- Cost to produce: what would a page good enough to rank actually take to create?
Keyword Research FAQs
Short-tail keywords are short, broad and high in volume, but harder to rank for and less specific about intent. Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases with lower individual volume, but less competition and clearer intent.
It is best treated as an ongoing habit rather than a one-off task. Revisit it whenever you plan new content, before a redesign or migration, and periodically, roughly every few months, for your existing pages, since search behavior and competition both shift over time.
This is usually called a content gap analysis: comparing your competitors’ ranking keywords against your own to surface what they cover that you do not. A competitive analysis tool does this automatically instead of manually cross referencing keyword lists.
It depends entirely on your site’s current authority and the keyword’s difficulty and relevance. A low volume keyword that closely matches your offer and is easy to rank for is often a better target than a high volume one you have no realistic chance of ranking for yet.
No. Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends and Answer The Public will get you a solid starting list for free. A paid tool becomes worth it once you need difficulty scores, competitor keyword data, or research at scale.
