Knowing that keyword research matters is not the same as knowing how to do it. Most guides to the subject either stay at the level of principle — explaining why keywords are important without explaining what to actually do — or dive immediately into tool-specific walkthroughs that become outdated whenever the tool’s interface changes. This guide takes a different approach: a keyword research step by step process that is tool-agnostic, grounded in the underlying logic of how search engines work, and structured so that you can follow it regardless of which research tools you have access to.
The process described here is the same one we follow for client engagements at Web Inclusion. It is not the only valid approach, but it is a consistent, repeatable one that produces a usable keyword strategy as its output rather than just a spreadsheet of data.
Step 1 — Define What You Are Trying to Achieve
Before opening any research tool, establish what you are doing this for. Keyword research in service of a content programme has different priorities from keyword research in service of a product page optimisation or a site-wide SEO audit. The scope and depth of the exercise depends on its purpose.
Specifically, you want to define: who your target audience is and what problems or questions they bring to search engines; what commercial outcomes you want organic traffic to support (enquiries, sales, downloads, registrations); and what topics your business is genuinely positioned to address with authority. That last point is important — targeting keywords outside your demonstrable area of expertise will produce content that ranks poorly and converts worse.
Step 2 — Map Your Topic Clusters
Write down the five to ten broad themes that define what your business does and what your audience cares about. These are not keywords yet — they are topic areas. For a digital agency, examples might include: website development, SEO, content strategy, CMS platforms, web application development, and digital transformation.
Each of these themes will become a cluster — a group of related keywords and the content pieces that address them. The cluster structure is important because it is how you build topical authority rather than just individual page rankings. Search engines have become sophisticated at assessing whether a domain understands a topic comprehensively or just addresses it superficially.
Step 3 — Generate Seed Keywords
For each topic cluster, generate a list of seed keywords — the straightforward, obvious terms that describe the topic. These are typically short, broad, and highly competitive. You are not going to rank for most of them in the short term, but they are the entry point for the tool-based expansion that follows.
For the SEO cluster, seed keywords might include: keyword research, SEO strategy, search engine optimisation, organic traffic, on-page SEO. Write them down without worrying yet about volume or competition — that comes in the next step.
Step 4 — Expand Using Research Tools
Take your seed keywords into a keyword research tool and expand each one into its full universe of related terms. At a minimum this means: related keywords and variations, question-based queries, and long-tail phrases that contain the seed term or closely related language.
The tools most commonly used for this — Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz Keyword Explorer — all work on the same underlying principle: they show you what people are actually searching for in relation to your seed term, along with volume and difficulty data for each variation. Free alternatives, including Google’s own autocomplete, the “people also ask” box, and tools like Answer the Public or Keyword Surfer, provide useful supplementary data even if their volume figures are less precise.
The output of this step is typically a large, messy list. That is expected. Refinement comes next.
Step 5 — Filter by Volume and Difficulty
With your expanded list, apply two filters: minimum search volume and maximum difficulty. The right thresholds depend on your domain’s current authority and your realistic ranking potential.
For a domain with limited existing authority, a maximum keyword difficulty of 30 to 40 (on a 100-point scale, as used by most tools) is a reasonable starting point. This filters out terms where the ranking positions are held by pages with substantial link authority that you cannot realistically displace in the near term.
For search volume, there is no universal minimum — it depends on your sector and your audience size. In a niche B2B context, a term with 50 monthly searches may be highly valuable if it precisely describes your ideal client’s problem. In a broader consumer market, you might set a higher floor. The key is relevance and realistic commercial value, not volume in isolation.
After filtering, you should have a shorter, more actionable list of terms with realistic ranking potential.
Step 6 — Assess Search Intent for Each Term
For every term that survives the volume and difficulty filter, search for it yourself and look at the results page. You are assessing two things.
First, intent: is Google returning informational articles, commercial service pages, product listings, or a mix? This tells you what type of content is appropriate. If you plan to write an informational article for a term where Google is returning commercial pages, you are misreading the intent and the article is unlikely to rank regardless of its quality.
Second, quality of existing results: are the pages currently ranking thin, outdated, or generic? Or are they comprehensive, recent, and from high-authority domains? The former represents a genuine content gap your article can fill. The latter means the opportunity is harder, and you need to assess whether you can produce something demonstrably better.
Remove any terms where the intent doesn’t match your planned content type. Flag any where the current results quality is weak — these are your highest-priority targets.
Step 7 — Assign Keywords to Content Pieces
Group your filtered, intent-assessed keywords back into their topic clusters and assign them to specific content pieces. Each piece of content should have one primary keyword — the term it is most directly optimised for — and a small number of closely related secondary terms that will appear naturally in a thorough treatment of the topic.
Avoid assigning the same primary keyword to multiple pieces of content. This creates keyword cannibalism — where your own pages compete against each other in search results, diluting the ranking signal for each. If two content ideas seem to target the same term, either merge them into one piece or differentiate them clearly enough that they target distinct variations with different intents.
Step 8 — Prioritise and Build an Editorial Plan
Not everything can be produced at once, and not everything deserves equal priority. Rank your content pieces by a combination of: strategic importance to the business, realism of ranking potential, and how quickly they can be produced to an appropriate standard.
The output of this step is an editorial plan — a list of content pieces in priority order, each with a primary keyword, an intent classification, a content format, and a target publication date. This is the document that drives the content programme forward.
Step 9 — Revisit Regularly
Keyword research is not a one-time exercise. Search behaviour changes as language evolves, new topics emerge, and seasonal patterns shift. Competitor content changes the ranking landscape for any given term. Your own domain authority changes as you publish more content and accumulate more links.
At a minimum, revisit your keyword strategy every six months. After any significant content push, check Google Search Console for new impression data — you will often find terms you are unexpectedly appearing for, which may reveal new opportunities worth pursuing.
The businesses that get the most from keyword research are the ones that treat it as an ongoing discipline rather than a project with a defined end date.
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Web Inclusion conducts keyword research and builds editorial plans for businesses that want their content investment to generate measurable organic traffic. If you would like a keyword research step by step analysis for your own site, we would be glad to discuss what that involves.