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 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:
Determine the popularity of specific search terms and understand what your audience is actively searching for.
Evaluate a keyword's difficulty ranking — how hard it is for a newer or established website to rank for that keyword.
Discover new keywords to help inspire your content strategy and writing direction.
With keyword research, we can answer important SEO questions such as:
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.
Tools like Optiwing's Keyword Discovery tool and Search Volume Checker make it easy to find and validate keyword ideas at scale — helping you answer all of these questions faster.
Let's get to it, here's how to do keyword research:
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. Optiwing also offers a Keyword Discovery tool that can help you find seed keywords if you don't have a third-party tool.
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 cover 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.
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 manually verify the top results for any keyword in your clusters.
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's AI Content Brief tool can help you build a structured outline based on your keyword group.
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 job. I downloaded the following results from Optiwing:
With these groupings, you can also use Optiwing's Search Volume Checker to validate the volumes of your keyword groups and the SERP Similarity tool to double-check that grouped keywords truly share the same search intent.
Use our Keyword Discovery tool to find untapped keyword opportunities, then group them into content clusters automatically.
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.
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 ready, you can speed up content creation using Optiwing's AI Blogpost Writer to generate draft articles optimized for your keyword clusters, and the Schema Helper to add structured data for richer search results.
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. Use Optiwing's Search Volume Checker to validate volumes.
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 as a reference for on-page optimization. Combine this with Optiwing's AI Content Brief to create detailed content outlines that cover the right topics for each keyword cluster.
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.
That's the simple step-by-step guide to doing keyword research.
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.
Find new keyword ideas and opportunities for any niche. Perfect for generating your initial seed keyword lists.
Automatically group thousands of keywords into topical clusters using live SERP data from Google.
Validate keyword search volumes and find the most promising targets for your content strategy.
Analyze the top-ranking pages for any keyword and understand what it takes to compete in the search results.
Sign up for Optiwing and get 100 free credits. Discover keywords, group them into clusters, and check SERPs — all in one platform. No credit card required.
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines. By understanding what your audience searches for, you can create content that matches their intent, drive organic traffic, and improve your website's visibility in search results. It is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy.
Seed keywords are the broad, foundational search terms you start with when doing keyword research. They represent the core topics of your niche or industry. For example, if you run a snowboard shop, "snowboard" would be a seed keyword. From there, keyword research tools expand these seeds into hundreds or thousands of related, more specific keywords you can target.
Focus on keywords that balance high search volume with low keyword difficulty and strong relevance to your niche. Commercial and transactional intent keywords (like "best snowboard for beginners") often convert better than purely informational ones. Use tools like Optiwing's Search Volume Checker to validate volumes and the SERP Checker to assess competition.
Keyword grouping (or clustering) organizes your keywords into topical clusters based on shared search intent. This prevents keyword cannibalization, helps structure your site logically, and lets you target multiple related keywords with a single piece of content. Without grouping, you risk creating competing pages that dilute your rankings. Optiwing's Keyword Grouping tool automates this process using live SERP data.
Yes. Google Search Console and Google Ads Keyword Planner are both free and effective for keyword research (as shown in Example Three above). Google Search Console shows you what queries already drive impressions to your site, while Keyword Planner helps you discover related terms. You can then use Optiwing to group those keywords into clusters — 100 free credits are available on signup.
Keyword research should be an ongoing process. Perform a thorough initial research when launching a new site or entering a new niche, then revisit your keyword strategy quarterly or whenever you notice shifts in search trends, traffic patterns, or industry changes. Tools like Optiwing's Keyword Discovery make it easy to continuously find new opportunities as they emerge.