SEOs tend to over-complicate things when doing keyword research. In this article I'll show you the basics of how to do keyword research in under 5 minutes for basically any niche you can think of. With examples for a few different tools and niches to follow. So you can see how it works in practice.
Keyword research is finding search terms that people commonly enter into search engines. Keyword research is useful for SEO by allowing us to:
With keyword research, we can answer important SEO questions such as:
What are people searching for in your niche?
How many people are searching for it each month?
What format do they want the information in? (Questions, lists, examples, etc.)
Once you understand what your target audience is looking for, you can tailor make content that is search intent-oriented while still providing value to everyone who discovers it. This is essential, especially considering Google's Helpful Content Update. This update is designed to rank content higher that genuinely helps users and provides value for their specific needs. So for understanding user intent and to get your content to rank higher, you must master keyword research. Which is a much simpler task than you might think.
Let's get to it, here's how to do keyword research in 5 minutes:
First: You'll need a keyword research tool. I recommend using Ahrefs or SEMrush, but you can even use Google Search Console for free if you already have some impressions for your website. I'll give an example of that at the end.
I'll be using SEMrush for this example, but the same concepts apply for using Ahrefs. You'll also need a keyword clustering tool. I'll be using Optiwing's keyword grouping tool which you can try for free. You can also use Optiwing's Keyword Discovery Tool to find new keyword ideas and the Search Volume Checker to validate search volumes in bulk.
Optiwing's Keyword Discovery Tool finds hundreds of related keyword ideas from any seed keyword. Pair it with the Search Volume Checker to validate demand before you write.
Keyword Research Tools Needed: Ahrefs / SEMrush & Optiwing
The scenario: We're an affiliate marketer in the snow sports industry. We want to write content about the best snowboards, the top snowboard boots/bindings, and snowboard reviews.
First we will need to select some starter keywords. These will be broad search terms that covers the industry or niche as a whole.
I simply chose snowboard to try to catch as many related keywords and accessories as possible. Note: It is often wise to include both the singular and plural form of your keyword. For this example, you could also include "snowboards" in your keyword research, but for simplicity we will be sticking to just "Snowboard".
Next, we'll be using SEMrush's keyword magic tool. Here's how to do it:
Once our keyword report is ready, click on "Broad Match" (or "Terms Match" in Ahrefs) to see all results with our seed keyword in them. SEMrush will find all keywords/search terms that have our seed words in them. In this case, we have 298,975 keywords with the seed keyword "Snowboard" in them.
We need to curate our list of matching terms for the best result and to get rid of some unnecessary keywords we don't care to target. You'll notice that some of the matching terms aren't relevant. For instance, we end up with the terms "ride snowboards" and "how to snowboard". While we could promote a product through informational content we are focusing on commercial and transactional keywords for now.
We're going to want to refine our results to eliminate any unwanted results. The easiest way to do this is create a list of includes. Includes are any words that should appear in the search terms along with our seed keywords. Since we're an affiliate marketer, we are focused on commercial or transactional intent keywords.
Anything like "best", "top", "review", and "reviews" and one of my favorites "beginner". These are all great ways to narrow our results down. Remember to choose "Any Word" when you create this filter or it will require every word in the list to be in the search term.
This narrowed our results down to 25,812 keywords, this is a lot better but we can narrow this down even more to refine our results a bit more.
We want to narrow our list down even further and we can do this by adding some exclude keywords. An exclude word is any word that we don't want to appear in our search terms. In this case, we don't want our list to include terms like "best places to snowboard" or "snowboard shop near me".
So, we create an exclude list. My list has the following words in it: "place", "places", "near me", and "shop". Add your list to the Exclude filter and click Apply.
Our list has now shrunk to 24,818 keywords. We could group these now, but this would use quite a lot of resources and include a lot of very low volume keywords so we're going to narrow it down until we have a list of around 500-10,000 keywords depending on the size of our niche.
Click on the Volume filter, and add a minimum. In this case I decided anything under 20 volume wasn't worth targeting. This will narrow our keyword list down quite a bit.
This narrowed our list down to 4,711 keywords, a much more reasonable number. We could narrow this down more by adding more include/excludes or tweaking our volume further but I'm going to stick with this list.
Pro Tip: You can quickly validate search volumes in bulk with Optiwing's Search Volume Checker to confirm the data from your keyword research tool before moving on.
Now we're going to use a keyword grouping tool to help us understand how we can best use this keyword list. Hit the Export button. Remember to export all the rows as CSV, or UTF-16 (Microsoft Excel CSV). You'll end up with a file that looks something like this.
But we're not done there, this file isn't particularly helpful to us. We're going to use a keyword clustering tool to make it more useful to us.
Once you've got your exported list, head over to the Optiwing Dashboard.
It should look something like this:
Finally, choose your geography and device. For this example, I'm leaving it as the United States and Desktop.
Click on Launch Job.
What does Optiwing actually do? Optiwing takes your keyword list and runs every single keyword through Google. It will group any keywords that share at least 3 ranking results on the first page of organic Google results.
Basically if a set of keywords have 3 or more ranking pages that are the same, we know that we only need one article to target that set of keywords because the same pages rank for different variations of those keywords. Once our job is complete, we can take a look at the results.
We will see a list of keywords, and the number of variations in each grouping. Each button is a topic that requires its own article.
Each button has the primary keyword as the title. We can click on the button to see the keywords in that group.
We can also see the aggregate volume, the Keyword Difficulty (How hard it is to rank for a particular keyword on a scale of 0-100), as well as all of the keywords in each group.
You can also use Optiwing's SERP Checker to analyze the top ranking pages for any keyword, or the SERP Similarity Tool to compare how similar two keywords' search results are.
So how can we use this to improve our SEO and content strategy? When writing an article, we try to keep the primary keyword in the title, meta description, and first paragraph. We'll use keyword variations as H2's and organically sprinkle them throughout our content in a way that doesn't detract from the content but is consistent with normal speech or conversation.
Optiwing groups thousands of keywords in minutes using live Google SERP data. 100 free credits on signup, no credit card required.
Keyword Research Tools Needed: Ahrefs / SEMrush & Optiwing
The scenario: We're an SEO agency targeting real estate professionals.
I chose the following seed keyword: Real Estate
I used SEMrush to generate a list of related keywords, this gave me a list of over 2 million keywords.
I filtered the list down by adding the keywords: SEO, digital marketing, CRM, blog, blogs, podcast, podcasts, internet, CRM, paid ad, paid ads, PPC.
I added the exclude keywords "Digital Real Estate" because I noticed a lot of keywords about this which I didn't want in my final results.
I decided to again filter out anything under 20 volume.
After applying these filters I was left with a little over 1,000 keywords which is ideal.
I exported my report from SEMrush as a CSV and imported it into a new Optiwing keyword grouping job. I downloaded the following results from Optiwing:
Keyword Research Tools Needed: Google Search Console, Google Ads Keyword Planner & Optiwing
The scenario: We're trying to get more traffic to our blog by making more content related to the search queries that are already performing well for our website.
First, we're going to head over to Google Search Console and look under the performance tab to see which search queries our website is generating the most clicks from. Here are the results from our example website:
Then we'll go to Google Ads Keyword Planner and enter the top 10 queries from our website into the keyword planner keyword discovery tool.
Alternative: You can also use Optiwing's Keyword Discovery Tool to generate additional keyword ideas from your top-performing search terms.
Select all keywords and click "Download keyword ideas" to download the entire list of related keywords.
Download the results as a .csv file
In order to group our keywords we need to make sure our file is properly formatted, remove the extra lines added at the top of the .csv file by Google Keyword Planner, make sure the first row is labels and the following rows are keywords/stats.
Our file will look something like this when done, we can manually remove rows to get rid of keywords we don't want to include in our grouping, or sort by volume and remove low volume keywords if we want.
Now we can open up Optiwing and start a new job with our edited csv file.
Now we have groupings of keywords we can target with a single article each, and we can use these topical clusters to inspire our future content and double down on what's already working and generating clicks for us.
Once you have your keyword groups, you can use Optiwing's AI Content Brief tool to generate a detailed content outline, or go straight to drafting with the AI Blogpost Writer.
So what do we do with our list of awesome keyword ideas? Here are some tips:
Browse through your keyword list and highlight or save options that are:
These articles will bring more organic traffic than low-volume ones. Prioritize keywords with significant search volume.
Don't waste your time trying to challenge industry titans. A low keyword difficulty, paired with high volume searches, is often easier pickings.
Your chosen keyword must be relevant to your industry or niche. Relevance improves the user intent match for your content.
Understand how the article aligns with your business goals. Is it at the bottom of the marketing funnel or the top?
Ideally, you'd want to create articles for every keyword group. However, this can be expensive and time-consuming. So, prioritize keywords. If a keyword is high in volume, low in difficulty, relevant to your niche, and aligns with your business goals, it should be your initial target.
I personally like Backlinko's Guide to On-Page SEO for learning the fundamentals of on-page optimization. You can also use Optiwing's Schema Helper to add structured data markup and boost your visibility in search results.
Internal and external linking is crucial to capitalize on your keyword research efforts. Create internal links on secondary keywords (also known as keyword variations). This is a powerful way of boosting your overall SEO performance.
As for external links, if you'll be guest posting or link building, use the keyword variations as your external link anchors.
From keyword discovery to content creation, Optiwing has everything you need. Group keywords, check SERPs, analyze search volume, and generate content briefs — all in one place.
That's that simple step-by-step guide to doing keyword research in just 5 minutes. To recap, here are the steps again:
Following these steps consistently will help you become a topical authority in your niche. Remember, SEO is a marathon not a sprint, and providing useful and valuable content is foremost important.
Optiwing offers a complete suite of SEO tools to power your keyword research workflow from start to finish:
Group thousands of keywords into topical clusters using live Google SERP data. Upload a CSV and get results in minutes.
Find hundreds of related keyword ideas from any seed keyword to expand your content strategy.
Validate search volumes in bulk to prioritize the most impactful keywords for your content.
Analyze the top ranking pages for any keyword to understand the competitive landscape.
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines. It helps you understand what your target audience is looking for, how popular those search terms are, and how difficult it would be to rank for them. This data drives your SEO and content strategy decisions.
With the right tools, keyword research can be done in as little as 5 minutes. Use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to discover keywords, then use Optiwing's Keyword Grouping Tool to automatically cluster them into topical groups. The grouping step that used to take hours in spreadsheets now takes just minutes.
At minimum, you need a keyword discovery tool (Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Keyword Planner) and a keyword grouping tool like Optiwing. Optiwing also offers a Keyword Discovery Tool, Search Volume Checker, and SERP Checker to cover your entire workflow.
Keyword grouping (or clustering) is the process of organizing related keywords into clusters based on shared search intent. It's important because it prevents keyword cannibalization, helps you structure your site correctly, and ensures each piece of content targets the optimal set of keywords. Tools like Optiwing do this by comparing the top Google search results for each keyword — if two keywords share 3 or more of the same top 10 URLs, they belong in the same group.
Yes. You can use Google Search Console (free) to find keywords your site already ranks for, and Google Ads Keyword Planner (free with a Google Ads account) to discover related keyword ideas. For keyword grouping, Optiwing offers 100 free credits on signup with no credit card required, so you can try clustering your keywords at no cost.
Rather than targeting a fixed number of keywords, you should target one keyword cluster per page. A cluster typically contains a primary keyword and several variations that share the same search intent. This could be anywhere from 2 to 50+ keywords depending on the topic. Using a keyword grouping tool ensures you group the right keywords together so one page can rank for all of them.