A step-by-step guide to keyword research (bonus: best keyword research tools compared)

Did you know that 68% of all online experiences begin with a search? Or that organic search is the source of 53% of all website visitors?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important marketing strategies in today’s world…

And it starts with keyword research.

This step-by-step keyword research guide will teach you how to find profitable keywords.

Learn how to identify high-performing keywords that drive revenue and how to avoid the keywords that will waste your time and money — even if you’re a complete beginner.

As a bonus, we also compare the best keyword research tools and teach you how to use them as quickly as possible, so you can skip the learning curve and get straight to winning on Google.

SEO keyword research basics

Before sharing how to research keywords for your SEO campaign, let’s briefly cover what keyword research is and why it’s important to choose the right keywords.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the strategic process of discovering and evaluating the exact terms your potential customers are searching for in search engines.

This is done using free and/or paid keyword research tools, like Ahrefs or the Google Keyword Planner, that show you what people are searching for on Google and other search engines.

How important is keyword research?

SEO can be complex, but it boils down to four fundamentals:

1. Technical optimization
2. Keyword research
3. Creating and optimizing content
4. Link building

Site speed is important, and Kinsta’s Managed WordPress hosting can massively improve your website performance. But it’s not the most important thing…

Keyword research is the most important step in SEO.

Why?

Because you can create the best content in the world and rank #1 on Google — but it doesn’t matter if that traffic isn’t bringing you any money or leads.

If you choose the wrong keywords, you waste your time and resources.

Proper keyword research is more than just finding keywords you can rank for. It means understanding the keyword’s business potential and how it fits your content strategy.

Keyword analysis metrics

You need a basic understanding of keyword metrics before you follow any keyword research process. Specifically, you need to know:

1. What “Search Intent” is and why you better not get it wrong.
2. How to tell if you can realistically rank for a keyword (i.e. “Keyword Difficulty”).
3. How to see the total search engine traffic potential of a keyword.
4. How to determine if a keyword is actually valuable to your business.

Let’s break each of these down, starting with…

Search intent

Search intent is exactly what it sounds like: the ‘intent’ of the person searching for a given keyword.

In other words, what is the user looking for?

Satisfying search intent is Google’s #1 goal — they want their users to find exactly what they’re looking for when they search. And that’s exactly what your goal needs to be whenever you create content with the goal of ranking on page one.

Common types of Search Intent include informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional intent.

• Informational intent: Users want to learn more about something (e.g., “what is keyword research”)
• Commercial intent: Users want to do research before making a purchase decision (e.g., “best keyword research tool”)
• Navigational intent: Users want to find a specific page (e.g., “Kinsta login”)
• Transactional intent: Users want to complete a specific action, usually a purchase (e.g., “buy Kinsta hosting”)

IMPORTANT: If your content doesn’t match the search intent of a keyword, it doesn’t matter how good it is or how many links you build. Your website will never rank because it’s simply not what the user was looking for when they made the search.

For example, say you write a guide promoting the best small campers while trying to rank for the keyword “small campers.”

There’s a huge issue here. Most people searching “small campers” on Google intended to purchase a small camper—not to research the best small campers.

Because you missed search intent, this article will never reach page one for its target keyword, even if it acquires strong backlinks and is well-written.

To avoid this mistake, you should always manually type a keyword into Google and analyze what’s currently ranking. Make sure your content matches the type of content already ranking.

We’ll discuss this in more detail later. For now, just know that you need the proper answer to any keyword you target before you can ever hope to rank well. Moving on…

Keyword difficulty

Experienced SEO professionals gauge the ranking difficulty of each keyword manually.

There are several methods to determine keyword difficulty, but one way to do it is to perform a SERP analysis for the keyword, accounting for things like:

• Search intent
• Quality & depth of content
• Number & quality of backlinks
• Domain Rating (DR) of ranking websites
• SERP features

This process depends on your goals and chosen keywords because not all keywords are ranked with the same weight on individual ranking factors.

For example, keywords like “San Diego weather” rely on freshness. It has to be updated in near real-time.

However, keywords like “how to start a garden” place less emphasis on freshness because the information is relevant for a long time.

Alternatively, you can see keyword difficulty at a glance with an SEO tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush. They have a Keyword Difficulty (KD) score for each keyword, which is based on the number of unique websites linking to the top 10 ranking pages.

KD can be used to determine how difficult it might be to rank in the top 10 of Google’s search results based on links alone.

You shouldn’t rely solely on KD to determine the true difficulty of ranking for a keyword, but it is a good gut-check metric to determine how competitive a keyword may be.

As a rule of thumb, if you see a lot of well-known companies ranking for a keyword (like Forbes or Business Insider), it’s probably going to be difficult to compete with them.

But that doesn’t mean you should never target competitive keywords!

In fact, if you find a keyword that would be extremely valuable to your business but highly competitive, it’s probably better to create a page for it sooner rather than later. Backlinks take time to acquire, and the longer that content is around, the higher its chance of ranking.

Search volume

Search volume is an estimation of how many times a keyword is searched for in a search engine.

There are four important things to know about monthly search volume:

1. It’s the number of searches, not the number of people who searched – Sometimes, the same person searches for a keyword multiple times in one month (e.g., “weather in San Diego”). Every one of these searches contributes to the search volume of that keyword, even when the same person is making the search.
2. It’s not an accurate gauge for traffic – Even if you rank #1 for a keyword, your traffic from that keyword will never reach the total search volume. Some searchers never click on a result; others skip the first result and click elsewhere.
3. It’s an annual average – If a keyword has 120,000 searches in January and zero in the other 11 months, its search volume is shown as 10K (120K/12 months).
4. It’s country-specific – Keyword tools usually show search volume for the chosen country. However, some tools can also provide the global search volume, which combines the search volumes from all countries.

There are many ways to see search volume — you can use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner or a paid tool like Ahrefs (shown below).

Most people look solely at search volume when researching keywords, but this is a mistake.

Why? Isn’t the goal to get more traffic? More searchers = more traffic = better keyword, right?

Not necessarily.

Just because a keyword can get you a lot of traffic doesn’t mean that acquired traffic is valuable to your business.

For example, the author managed to rank position #1 for the keyword “mini camper,” which gets 7,000 searches per month — but they made $0 from the article. The searchers simply weren’t looking to buy anything.

And sometimes, search volume is deceiving.

Take the keyword “when was google founded,” for example.

According to Ahrefs, 4,900 people search for this keyword every month — but only 690 people actually click on any of the results.

This is because you can see the answer directly on Google; you don’t need to click to find it:

Side note: The keyword data under the search bar is from Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar plugin.

On the other hand, a low search volume doesn’t necessarily mean a keyword is bad or that the number you see is the number of visitors you’ll get.

Virtually all pages that rank on the first page of Google for one keyword also rank for dozens, hundreds, or sometimes thousands of other keywords.

For example, look at this Kinsta review.

The target keyword is “Kinsta review,” which, according to Ahrefs, gets around 1,100 searches per month.

However, as you can see in the screenshot below, it also ranks for 32 other keywords and even ranks on page one for “Kinsta hosting” at 1,900 searches per month.

This is why relying solely on the search volume of a single keyword can be misleading when estimating the total potential traffic a page might receive.

Instead, examine the top-ranking pages for that keyword and see how much traffic they get from all the keywords it ranks for. In Ahrefs, this metric is called “Traffic Potential,” which estimates the total traffic a page gets from all the keywords it ranks for, not just the one you’re analyzing.

This metric isn’t always accurate, but it’s a better gauge of potential traffic from a keyword than just looking at search volume for that single keyword.

That said, high-traffic keywords with low competition aren’t the only thing you should look for when doing SEO keyword research — you also need to determine a keyword’s business value.

How to tell if a keyword is valuable

To determine a keyword’s business value, ask yourself three questions:

1. Will ranking for this keyword positively impact my business?
2. What are advertisers willing to spend on this keyword, and why?
3. Does this keyword fit into my overall content strategy?

1. Will ranking for this keyword positively impact my business?

A “positive impact” usually means increasing revenue via direct sales or attracting potential leads (e.g., email subscribers) into your funnel.

However, positive impact can be measured in other ways as well.

For example, one of Google’s ranking factors (according to their “How Search Works” page) is topical authority, which mostly refers to your total coverage of a topic.

This means that if you want to rank for “best WordPress plugins” (a very high-income potential keyword), you should also create content around keywords like “is WordPress still relevant” and “how to install WordPress plugins.”

Google wants to see that you are a topical authority in your niche. The more relevant topics (and keywords) you cover, the better your shot at first-page rankings for ALL those keywords.

So even though “is WordPress still relevant” may not directly lead to sales or email subscribers, it still positively impacts your business because it improves your rankings for more valuable keywords like “best WordPress plugins.”

To sum it up: Will this keyword either directly or indirectly lead to sales for my business? If the answer is no, skip the keyword.

2. Are advertisers willing to spend a lot on this keyword?

Cost-per-click (CPC) is a metric advertisers use to estimate the cost of running ads for a keyword.

However, it can also serve as a useful proxy for a keyword’s value.

For example, the keyword “WordPress hosting” has a high CPC of $12. The high cost is because people searching for it are likely to make a purchase.

A keyword with a high CPC could be valuable to your business. Look at the pages running ads for the keyword and try to figure out what’s making them money from this keyword and if you can do the same.

Keep in mind that CPC is volatile — it can change minute-to-minute based on how many businesses are advertising for that keyword at any given time.

To sum it up: If a keyword has a high CPC, ask yourself why. It could be a sign that a keyword is valuable and worth pursuing.

3. Does this keyword fit into my overall content strategy?

Remember when I said topical authority is a ranking factor for Google? Well, it should be a factor in your keyword strategy as well.

Avoid “orphan” keywords that don’t relate to your topical expertise. Just because you can rank for a keyword doesn’t mean you should.

Instead, try to build keyword “buckets” where all the keywords have a theme.

Ahrefs does this well. They created content buckets for one of their authors — SEO content, affiliate marketing content, and general online marketing content.

You can see this reflected on his author page:

We’ll teach you more about creating these buckets in the next section.

To sum it up: Make categories, or “buckets,” for your keywords to go in. Only choose keywords that fit into one of these buckets.

How to do keyword research for SEO (step-by-step)

Ready to learn how to find profitable keywords?

Here are the five steps of basic keyword research:

1. Brainstorm categories & seed keywords
2. Use keyword research tools to find more keywords
3. Analyze search intent
4. Prioritize your keywords
5. Create a content strategy

Let’s dive in!

Step 1: Brainstorm categories and seed keywords

Remember those content “buckets” we talked about earlier?

It’s time to come up with them.

Create a list of 3-5 categories that all of your website content will fit into. These categories should encompass everything your brand will talk about or rank for.

For example, some categories for Kinsta’s blog include:

• WordPress
• Website hosting
• Website performance optimization

Next up, seed keywords are broad terms related to your niche that people might use to find your products or services.

For example, a list of seed keywords for Kinsta might be:

• WordPress
• Website hosting
• Website security
• Site speed improvement
• Website performance optimization
• Managed website services

Ideally, you want your seed keywords to be high-level. “WordPress” is a good example because you can add other words to it to create new keywords, like “WordPress plugins” or “WordPress hosting.”

Here are some ways to find seed keywords:

• List core topics: Think about the main topics your business or website covers.
• Use your knowledge: Write down any keywords that come to mind related to these topics.
• Ask your team: Get input from colleagues.
• Use AI: Prompt GPT with something like “Help me come up with a list of seed keywords for SEO keyword research. My company…” and explain what your company does.

ChatGPT is great for this process. With a quick prompt, it can easily generate dozens of keyword ideas.

Once you have your keyword lists, it’s time for the next step.

Step 2: Use keyword research tools to find more keywords

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of keyword research tools on the market today. Some are very niche, but most are just slightly different takes on the same idea.

So what’s the best one? Let’s break it down by free and paid tools.

Best free keyword research tools for SEO

There are four free keyword research tools I’ve used and recommend:

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz has a full suite of SEO tools, but their Keyword Explorer can be used for free. You type in a keyword, and it gives you information like search volume, KD, and keyword suggestions to help you find more keyword ideas.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free, scaled-down version of Ahrefs or Moz. It lets you spy on competitor’s backlinks, see what keywords they’re ranking for, and do some decent keyword research. If you’re doing SEO on a budget, it can get the job done.

Keyword Shitter

Keyword Shitter is a free keyword research tool. You type in a keyword and get hundreds of keyword suggestions. It’s great if you just need tons of ideas, but it mostly only spits out related keywords to the one you typed in, not unique, separate ideas.

Google Keyword Planner & Search Console

Google Keyword Planner is a free tool for people who want to display paid ads in search results. However, it can also be used to find organic keyword ideas. You can type in a seed keyword and get related keyword ideas.

You can also get long-tail keyword ideas from Google Search Console. Long-tail keywords are specific, longer phrases that are usually less competitive than seed phrases.

To find them in Google Search Console, go to the ‘Performance’ tab and scroll down to the ‘QUERIES’ section. You can use the Regex filter feature to find keywords that are 7 words or longer by typing ([^” “]*s){7,}?

Keep in mind that this only shows you queries your website already ranks for, so it’s not useful for websites with no rankings.

Best paid keyword research tools for SEO

If you’re serious about SEO and you have the budget, you’ll want to invest in a paid keyword research tool. While the free tools can be helpful, they are very limited.

Here is a list of the best paid keyword research tools:

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is hands-down my favorite SEO tool. It is not just for keyword research but also for link-building, rank tracking, content ideas, and more. It has all the bells and whistles and is easily the best all-around SEO tool on the market.

However, it comes at a steep price, with just the basic tool being $99 per month.

SEMrush

SEMrush is another great keyword research tool. It’s very comparable to Ahrefs but is more geared towards SEO professionals who need to create client dashboards.

SEMrush also has more search engine marketing and PPC features (thus, the SEM in SEMrush). They also have more free trial use options than Ahrefs.

Keyword Insights

Keyword Insights utilizes geo-specific, live search engine result page data to cluster keywords into similar groups and determine the search intent behind them.

A user simply uploads a list of keywords (as many as you’d like), and the tool will spit out a preformatted Google Sheets document with the clustered keywords and the intent.

It can also sort the grouped keywords into clusters, allowing you to more effectively create content silos and topical authority.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is an awesome tool for easily coming up with keyword ideas.

The tool shows you search volume, competition, and average CPC right on Google whenever you type something in. It also shows you stats on related keywords and the “people also search” keywords.

Suggested SEO tool stack

So, what keyword research tools should you get?

Our suggested stack is Ahrefs and Keyword Insights.

Ahrefs helps with every part of SEO, not just keyword research. Think technical SEO website audits, analyzing competitor’s backlinks, and more.

Keyword Insights lets you cluster keywords together to create content silos, which are helpful for cohesive internal linking and ensuring your content is all relevant to one another. This is a way of showing topical authority like we talked about earlier.

Want more SEO tools? Check out Kinsta’s list of must-have SEO plugins for WordPress.

How to use keyword research tools

There are three main strategies when using keyword research tools:

1. Expanding on seed keywords
2. Running a content gap analysis
3. Using AI for even more keyword ideas

Let me break these down.

Expanding on seed keywords

Grab your list of seed keywords and, one by one, plug them into your preferred keyword tool.

If you’re using Ahrefs, you can see different keyword ideas based on matching terms, related terms, and search suggestions. Check each of these for every keyword, noting anything interesting.

Doing this for hundreds of keywords can be time-consuming, but we can add some filters to narrow it down.

If you’re just starting your SEO journey, some helpful filters may be:

• KD of 0-30
• Search volume of at least 100

This will reduce your list, but keep in mind it may also limit you from finding some gold-nugget keywords. It depends on how much time and effort you want to put into your research.

Once you get tired of looking for keywords, move on to…

Running a content gap analysis

A content gap analysis is a powerful feature available in Ahrefs and other SEO tools. It allows you to compare your keyword rankings with your competitors’ and spits out the keywords they rank for that you don’t.

Here’s how it works:

1. Plug your site into Ahrefs (or your tool of choice) and click the Content Gap link in the left-hand menu.

2. Plug in 1-10 competitors ranking on Google for your seed keywords. You can find them by Googling those keywords and grabbing the URLs from Google or by using Ahrefs’ “Organic competitors” tool right above the content gap link. Click Show keywords.

3. From here, you can export the list to an Excel spreadsheet. Comb through the list right in Ahrefs, and if you see a keyword you want to target, open it in a new tab and add it to a keyword list using the + Add to button in the top right.

Using AI for even more keyword ideas

If you still don’t have enough keywords, you can use ChatGPT to come up with more ideas.

It’s super easy — here’s a prompt to try:

“I am doing SEO keyword research for my company, which sells [explain your product or service]. I want all of my keywords to fall under one of the following categories:

Bucket 1
Bucket 2
Etc.

Here are some of the keywords I’ve found so far:

[List 10-20 good keywords you’ve found]

Can you help me come up with more keyword ideas?”

Here’s an example of me doing this for that ecofriendly soap company:

You can continue to ask for more keyword ideas, and ChatGPT will keep giving you more. You can then vet these ideas by putting them in Ahrefs.

Step 3: Analyze search intent

Understanding the search intent behind a keyword is crucial for creating content that meets users’ needs. If you miss this, you have zero chance of ranking. So don’t miss it!

Identifying search intent is easy:

1. Search the Keyword: Type the keyword into Google to see what types of content are ranking.
2. Classify Intent: Determine if the intent is informational, commercial, navigational, or transactional.

Let’s go through a few examples.

If you search “organic skincare” on Google, here is the SERP (search engine results page):

The first results are all individual products. Under those, you can see the home pages of individual skincare brands.

This is a transactional keyword, at least in USA search results. You would have to create product pages in order to rank for this keyword or become a well-known organic skincare brand with a lot of backlinks.

But if we look at “benefits of natural skincare” instead, here’s what we see:

This is clearly an informational keyword, with results being blog articles about the benefits of natural skincare. There is a mix of listicles with “# benefits” and questions like “are natural skin care products worth the hype?”

By searching for the keyword and analyzing the results, you understand the search intent and the type of content you have to create to rank for that keyword.

You can also click through the results and see how in-depth the content is, the angle of approach, the strategy they’re using to monetize the content, and the competitors’ domain ratings (DR).

Let’s take all this info you’ve gathered so far and use it to make a final selection.

Step 4: Prioritize your keywords

Here’s how to prioritize keywords based on relevance, search volume, difficulty, and potential ROI…

Make two lists of keywords:

1. High-Value Keywords: Keywords with high business potential. You know that ranking well for these will make you a lot of money, even if it may be difficult to achieve.
2. Low-Hanging Fruit: Low-difficulty keywords with moderate search volume that will gain quick traffic. Note that when we say quick, we mean within 6-12 months.

It’s good to focus on one or two high-value keywords first to start aging the pages and acquiring links because it may take several years to rank for them.

But you should put the majority of your efforts into low-hanging fruit to see results faster. Generally, the more keywords you rank for, the better your chance of ranking for other keywords (topical authority).

Step 5: Create a content strategy

Last step! Let’s turn this list of keywords into an executable content strategy.

Your goal in this step is to:

• Cluster Your Keywords: Group related keywords together to create comprehensive content and avoid keyword cannibalization (creating more than one page trying to rank for the same or a similar keyword).
• Determine Content Types: Decide on the type of content (blog post, video, infographic, product page, etc.) that best matches the search intent.
• Create an Editorial Calendar: Plan when and how you will create and publish your content.

You can use a tool like Keyword Insights or Ahrefs’ Keyword Clustering tool to cluster your keywords for you, or you can do it manually.

Here’s what that might look like:

Once you’ve clustered all the similar keywords together to avoid keyword cannibalization and create content silos, the next step is to figure out the types of content you need to create to rank for these keywords.

In the search intent section, we gave examples like creating product pages for transactional keywords or creating a listicle blog post for keywords with listicle results.

Google the main keyword of each cluster and note the type of content ranking. In most cases, you will have to do something similar to compete.

The final step after that is to create a content calendar and get to work! Start by setting dates and building pages for your highest priority keywords, and slowly make your way down the list.

Summary

Here’s a quick recap of everything we’ve covered:

1. Keyword research is fundamental to SEO and should not be skipped.
2. Search volume and keyword difficulty can be deceiving. Do some deeper research by typing the keyword into Google and reviewing the results before you make a decision.
3. Don’t be fooled by low search volume. Find the total traffic potential of all the related keywords using Ubersuggest or Ahrefs.
4. Search intent is king. Make sure the content you create matches what people want to see (and what Google is already showing).
5. Prioritize your keywords based on business potential and low difficulty, but also target a few higher-value (but more competitive) keywords in the beginning.

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