Keyword research

What keyword research delivers

Keyword research collects the terms customers search with and orders them by demand and competition. It therefore answers not the question of what a business wants to say but what customers want to know. That distinction is the core: the most productive topics are often not the ones in the marketing plan.

Where the terms come from

The first source is your own environment and the most solid one. The on site search shows what customers did not find. Customer service knows the questions that keep coming. Sales hears the objections. These sources cost nothing and deliver terms nobody else sees.

The second source are tools delivering search volume and suggestions. They show how often a term is searched and which terms appear alongside it. The third source is competitors: which topics they serve, which pages rank, and which terms are missing there. The fourth source is the search engines themselves, through autocomplete and related searches.

How demand and competition are judged

• Volume: how often it is searched. A high value is only good when the intent fits.
• Competition: how strong the pages ranking today are. Weak competition with medium volume is often worth more than strong competition with high volume.
• Intent: is someone searching for information, a comparison or a purchase. The intent determines which page fits.
• Fit: does the term match the offer. A term with high volume and no matching product brings visitors who cannot buy.

Why search intent matters more than volume

A term can have ten thousand searches and still be unsuitable, when the searchers want something else. Someone looking for a guide does not want to buy a product. Someone entering an error code is looking for a solution, not a product page. Those terms belong in a guide and not on a sales page, otherwise traffic rises and the purchase rate falls.

Conversely, a term with three hundred searches and clear buying intent is often worth more than a general one with ten thousand. The comparison is not volume against volume but result against result.

Which mistakes distort the selection

The first mistake is selecting by volume alone. The second is restricting yourself to your own vocabulary: customers often search with other words than specialists do. The third is the missing check of intent, which produces traffic without purchases.

The fourth mistake is a one off research. Terms change, new ones appear, old ones disappear. A fixed collection that is continuously extended is sensible, most easily from your own search function. The fifth mistake is the missing assignment: a term without a target page stays an observation. Every research should point to an existing or planned page.

Frequent questions

• Do I need a tool? Not to start with. On site search and customer service deliver the first topics.
• How many terms per page? One as the main topic, a few related ones as support.
• How often to repeat? Collect continuously, evaluate once a quarter.