Grab your tea, because we're going to sit down and go through this one properly. Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO strategy that actually gets results.
It's how you uncover new opportunities, understand what your audience is really searching for, and see how your competitors are positioning themselves. Done thoroughly, it lights the path to more qualified organic traffic landing on your site.
This is our ultimate guide to keyword research, and we've written it to actually be comprehensive. We'll walk through the full process, from setting your goals through to building a proper keyword research report you can actually action, the tools we use ourselves day to day, how to work out what a keyword is really worth, and what's involved in scoring your competition properly.
Put simply, keyword research is the process of finding and analysing the words and phrases people actually type into Google (or ChatGPT, these days) when they're looking for what you sell. It's the essential first step before you write a page or a blog post, because it tells you exactly what to build content around, rather than guessing.
Before diving into research, take a step back and clearly define what you're actually trying to achieve. Are you looking to:
Setting your goals upfront means you can prioritise where you focus your efforts and identify the right keyword opportunities to pursue. It makes your research a lot more efficient, and it stops you chasing keywords that look impressive on paper but don't actually move your business forward. We've written more on how this ties into your wider strategy in our piece on SEO optimisations that impact your Google rankings.
Before you open a keyword tool, grab a spreadsheet and jot down a short list of "topic buckets," the broad categories your business fits into. Keep it tight, no more than ten. If you're a local plumber, your buckets might be emergency repairs, hot water systems, bathroom renovations and drain clearing.
Under each bucket, think about your different audience segments too, because they search differently. A first time homeowner and a landlord managing five properties won't type the same thing into Google, even if they both need a plumber. Breaking things down this way keeps your keyword research targeted instead of one big, messy list.
Every search has a reason behind it, and in SEO we call this search intent, or user intent. Getting this wrong is one of the fastest ways to waste your keyword research, because you can rank for a term and still get nowhere if the page doesn't match what the searcher actually wanted.
There are four main types of search intent:
Matching your content to the right intent matters more than the keyword itself. If someone's still in the informational stage and you serve them a hard sell landing page, they'll bounce straight off, and a high bounce rate is only going to work against you.
Save your landing pages and service pages for the commercial and transactional searches, and use blog content to capture the informational ones.
Ground your research in data by first taking stock of your website's current visibility and organic performance. Here's where to look:
In Google Analytics, you can see which channels are driving the most traffic to your site by heading to "Acquisition" in the Reports menu, then clicking "Overview." This shows you the top channels contributing to your website sessions for the selected time period.
To find traffic sources for a specific page, go to "Engagement » Pages and screens" in GA4. You'll see views and users for each page. To add source/medium data, click the plus icon above the Totals column and select "Traffic source," then "Session source / medium." This gives you a table of your pages by source/medium and views.
See your average ranking positions for your keywords, plus the actual queries bringing people to your site. A few of our own guides are worth reading alongside this step:
Get a full view of your current estimated organic traffic value, keyword rankings, backlink profile and more.
Taking this data-driven look lets you understand your strengths, growth areas and content gaps. Note your top organic landing pages, highest value keywords, and any underperforming content along the way.
There's no shortage of keyword research tools out there, but here are the ones we reach for most:
We've also put together a broader roundup of the best SEO tools used by SEO experts themselves and the top SEO tools to increase organic traffic, if you want the full toolkit beyond just keyword research.
With your objectives and baseline data in hand, it's time to start developing lists of relevant topics and keywords, known as "seed keywords," to explore further.
Semrush's Keyword Magic Tool and Keyword Overview let you:
Semrush's Keyword Manager also lets you compile and organise master lists of keywords tracked across all your projects, and Position Tracking shows where you currently rank for those keywords on both desktop and mobile, across different locations. It's a solid foundation for building out a proper keyword research report.
This is a step people skip, and it's a big miss. Once you've got your keyword list, it's worth figuring out the actual value of ranking for each one. Look at:
This is where the Semrush competition metric comes in handy too, giving you a read on how contested a keyword actually is before you commit resources to it. If you're weighing up whether to put your budget into paid or organic for a particular term, our guide to Google Ads vs SEO walks through exactly this decision.
You'll see domain rating, domain authority, domain trust or authority score mentioned constantly in SEO tools, and it's worth understanding what these actually are, because none of them are a metric created by Google.
Domain Authority was created by Moz, back when the company was still known as SEOmoz, founded in Seattle by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig. The idea was never to compete with or replace Google's own PageRank. Rand has explained that the goal was to build a model that could predict how likely a site was to outrank a competitor for the same keyword, essentially a scoreboard for who's stronger and why. In 2019, Moz rebuilt the algorithm entirely for a "DA 2.0," a project led by the late Russ Jones, to make it more accurate and harder to manipulate.
Ahrefs later built its own version, called Domain Rating (DR), introduced in 2016 as an alternative to Moz's metric. It's calculated purely from the strength and quality of a site's backlink profile, scored on a 0 to 100 logarithmic scale, meaning it gets exponentially harder to climb the closer you get to 100.
Every tool has since built its own version of the same underlying idea:
They all calculate it a little differently, and the scores won't match each other for the same website, but the principle is the same across the board: the more relevant, quality backlinks you earn from other reputable sites, the higher your score climbs, and the more trust search engines tend to place in your site.
None of these are confirmed Google ranking factors. Google's own engineers, including John Mueller, have publicly and repeatedly said as much, but they're still a useful shorthand for benchmarking your site against competitors when you're prioritising which keywords are realistically within reach. We've gone deeper into how to actually build these backlinks in our guide to getting high quality backlinks.
With your initial keyword lists created, dig deeper for additional ideas and prioritisation insights:
The key is using filters and customisations to unearth truly relevant, high potential opportunities that match your priorities. Save every promising keyword to a trackable master list in Keyword Manager.
With your prioritised list in hand, it's time to look at the competitive landscape and find the gaps.
Doing proper research on your competitors means comparing metrics for yourself and your client (or your own site) side by side. There's a whole lot you can compare here:
Semrush's Gap Explorer is brilliant for surfacing exactly where those gaps sit. From there, we'd recommend putting it all into an Excel or Google Sheets keyword competitive analysis spreadsheet, because you'll want to properly analyse all that data and spot where the real opportunities are for improvement.
A keyword difficulty score is a good starting point, but it doesn't tell the full story. Actually look at who's ranking on page one for your keyword and ask yourself honestly whether you could realistically outrank them.
Take a search like "best coffee machine." You'll typically find the top spots taken up by big publishers and review sites with huge domain ratings and years of affiliate content behind them.
If you're a small appliance retailer, going after that exact term head on probably isn't a fight worth having. What you can do instead is get specific, targeting something like "best coffee machine under $500 Australia," where the competition thins out and the intent is closer to a buyer who's ready to purchase from you.
Beyond the standard "blue links" list in search results, Google displays other SERP features, things like featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, review stars, image packs and knowledge panels.
Also now with AI there are AI overviews and opportunities to show up there, and in the SERP side panel. There's also google shopping SERP features too.
These sit right at the top of the page and can pull more attention (and clicks) than the number one organic result.
Long-tail, question-based keywords are usually what trigger these features, particularly featured snippets and People Also Ask. So when you're mapping out content, it's worth thinking about which of your keywords could realistically win one of these spots, not just where you'd sit in the regular rankings.
Now it's time to prioritise your final list based on things like:
Within Keyword Manager and Position Tracking, you can filter, group and sort your keyword lists against these criteria to work out which focus areas will deliver the biggest gains.
Once you've got your prioritised list, it's worth splitting it into your main keyword list and your additional, supporting keywords.
Both matter. Your main keywords carry the bulk of your traffic potential, but your additional keywords are often where the quicker wins sit, especially if you're working with a newer site or lower domain rating. This is also where semantic keywords come in, the related terms and phrases that support your main keyword and help search engines (and increasingly, AI tools) understand the full context of what your page is actually about.
Long-tail keywords are the specific, longer phrases people search once they've got a clearer idea of what they want, usually three words or more. Think "wedding dress" versus "wedding dress with detachable skirt Sydney." Individually, each long-tail term brings in less search volume, but they're far easier to rank for and tend to convert better, because the person searching is that much closer to making a decision. String enough of them together across your content and they add up to a solid chunk of your overall organic traffic.
Keyword research isn't just for blog posts. If you run an ecommerce site, you've got product and category pages that need this same level of research behind them. If you offer services, your service pages need it too. This is a big part of your site and it's easy to overlook. We've covered this in more depth in our guide to ecommerce SEO, because the approach for product and service pages is actually different to blog content.
A few things to keep in mind for non-blog pages specifically:
With priorities set, it's time to map your keywords to actual content:
Position Tracking makes it easy to monitor your progress and spot new opportunities as time goes on. If you want an extra layer of competitive benchmarking, SEranking is worth trying too, given how strong it is at SERP tracking and share of voice monitoring.
Remember that ranking for a keyword is only half the job. Once someone lands on your page, it needs to actually deliver what they were searching for. Our piece on what makes great content and how to increase engagement is worth a read once your keyword strategy is mapped out, so the content itself does its job too.
These two tools are brilliant for finding longer, question-based keywords. They map out what people are actually asking around your topic, sometimes called "query fanning," and give you a visual spread of related questions and phrases.
They're just suggestions though. Not everything they surface is going to be right for your brand, and at the end of the day, you're the one who knows what's actually best for your business and your audience.
This isn't a one-and-done process. Once you've got your list, aim to revisit it at least quarterly, tracking your rankings in Search Console and Position Tracking along the way so you know what's working and what's not. That said, it really depends on your business. If you launch a new service, add a new product line, or your industry shifts, that's your cue to go back and refresh your keyword research there and then, rather than waiting for the calendar to catch up.
Here's the tip that gets missed the most: you can't just go shoving keywords onto a page. It might not be relevant, and it depends entirely on what makes sense for that specific page and your audience. This is exactly why you need a proper keyword research tool to supplement your own instincts, rather than working off guesswork alone.
Once you've done the work, pull it together into a proper keyword research report. A simple keyword research excel sheet works well here, with columns for:
This becomes your single source of truth, and something you can keep coming back to and updating as your strategy evolves.
Modern SEO success requires more than just sprinkling keywords into pages. As search engines get better at understanding semantics and context, your content needs to demonstrate real topical relevance and quality to rank, and this now extends beyond traditional Google results too. We've written more on how AI is changing SEO and the introduction of AI overviews, and if you're curious whether your content quality is being scrutinised more closely, our piece on whether Google can detect AI content is worth a read too.
The best way to get there is exactly the approach we've walked through here: combining your business objectives, your website data, competitive insights, search intent, and semantically related keywords into one coherent plan.
When you do it properly, thorough keyword research sets the stage for creating targeted, structured content that's properly mapped to what your audience wants. Make data-driven keyword research and competitive analysis a consistent part of your content process, and the long-term organic growth follows.
If reading all of this has made you realise just how much goes into a proper keyword strategy, you're not wrong. It's a lot to stay on top of alongside actually running your business, and if you're weighing up whether to bring this in-house or bring in help, our guide to hiring an SEO expert is a good next read. That's exactly what our SEO services and SEO packages for small business are built for, so get in touch if you'd rather hand this part over to us.
AI tools are becoming part of everyday business quickly. You might already be using ChatGPT to help draft an email, come up with content ideas or answer a question but if you use Google, Gmail, Docs or Drive every day, there’s another AI tool you’re probably going to start seeing a lot more. Google Gemini. […]
Firstly, watermarking isn't just a Google thing When you generate an image using Google's Nano Banana model in Gemini, you'll have noticed the small sparkle watermark that gets added to the corner. Up until recently, there was no way to turn it off. That's changed. Watermarking on AI generated content isn't something exclusive to Google […]
Creating original images for every page of your website takes time, effort and money. That is why so many businesses use stock photography and AI-generated images. They’re fast, affordable and make getting a website or blog post live easier. Do stock photos hurt SEO? And do AI images impact SEO? Stock photos and AI images […]
