¿Qué es la investigación de palabras clave?
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.
¿Por qué es crucial la investigación de palabras clave para el 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:
- Palabras clave para las que quieres posicionar tu sitio.
- Y palabras clave que responden a las consultas de búsqueda de las personas que buscan lo que ofrece tu negocio.
Otro uso de la investigación de palabras clave es determinar qué temas debe cubrir el contenido del sitio. Mientras investigas, puedes averiguar si tus competidores están posicionando para alguna palabra clave para la que tú no lo estás haciendo.
La investigación de palabras clave es tan vital que, en última instancia, puede afectar al éxito de un negocio en su conjunto.
Proceso de investigación de palabras clave
Ahora que conocemos la importancia de realizar la investigación de palabras clave, es hora de profundizar en los pasos a seguir para este proceso:
Analyze your current keywords
En caso de que ya tengas una lista de palabras clave para las que quieres posicionarte, deberías empezar por revisarlas. Si no es así, ve directamente al siguiente paso.
Comprueba cómo están funcionando esos términos para tu sitio. Si tienes un sitio web pequeño, hay muchas herramientas gratuitas disponibles que puedes utilizar. Sin embargo, si necesitas una investigación más compleja, es mejor que elijas una herramienta de pago.
Utiliza Google Search Console para determinar para qué palabras clave ya está posicionando tu sitio. Crea una lista separando aquellas palabras clave que están funcionando bien de las que no, pero que siguen siendo valiosas. Tendrás que revisar esta última, siguiendo los pasos que se indican a continuación.
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
Tus esfuerzos de investigación de palabras clave serán en vano si no estableces tus objetivos de antemano, basándote en el tráfico orgánico que necesita tu negocio.
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.
Al determinar tus objetivos, debes hacerte preguntas específicas como: quién es tu público objetivo, cuáles son sus necesidades, qué estás vendiendo y cuál es tu propuesta de valor.
Make a list of the keywords you want to work on
Basándote en las respuestas a las preguntas del paso dos y teniendo en cuenta la experiencia empresarial, el siguiente paso es crear una lista que contenga las palabras clave que mejor se adapten a lo que busca tu público objetivo.
Pregúntate qué se preguntarían tus clientes potenciales cuando busquen información sobre tus productos, decidan a quién comprar dichos productos o quieran comprar productos como los tuyos.
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.
