How to do keyword research for SEO: a free step-by-step guide

Step 1: Start with seed keywords

Write down the services or products you sell and the problems you solve, in your customers' words, not your industry jargon. Add place names if you serve specific areas. Ten to twenty seeds is plenty.

Step 2: Expand them for free

• Google Keyword Planner. Inside a free Google Ads account, choose "Discover new keywords" and enter your seeds. It shows average monthly searches, competition and bid ranges. Without active ad spend, volumes show as ranges such as 1K–10K, which is enough for planning.
• Google autocomplete. Type a seed into Google and note the suggestions.
• People Also Ask and related searches on the results page.
• Google Search Console. Under Performance, see the actual searches your site already appears for. These are your easiest wins.
• YouTube search suggestions if video matters to your business.

Step 3: Understand search intent

For each keyword, look at what Google already shows on page one:

• Informational ("what is a cms website"): guides and definitions rank.
• Commercial ("best seo company for small business"): comparisons and service pages.
• Transactional ("website design packages"): service and pricing pages.
• Local ("dentist near me"): map results and local pages.

Create the type of page Google is already rewarding.

Step 4: Judge difficulty

Keyword Planner's "competition" measures advertisers, not organic difficulty, but it is a useful proxy. Also look at who ranks: if page one is all national brands and large publishers, choose a more specific keyword. New sites win first with long, specific phrases.

Step 5: Find competitors' keywords

Note which competitors rank for your seeds, then put their service pages into Keyword Planner's "start with a website" option. Paid tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs estimate competitors' rankings from their own crawls and clickstream data; they are helpful but not required to start.

Step 6: Group keywords and map them to pages

Put close variants together, such as "seo for lawyers", "law firm seo" and "lawyer seo services". Each group gets exactly one page. Two pages targeting the same group compete with each other.

Step 7: Prioritise

Score each group on volume, competition, intent and how directly it leads to a sale. Start with high-intent, low-competition groups. A keyword with 500 searches and buying intent usually beats one with 50,000 searches from people who only want a definition.

How to find keywords on a website

To see which keywords a page targets, read its title, H1 and headings, or view the page source. To see which searches a site actually ranks for, use Search Console for your own site or a third-party tool for others.

How we use this at Sitesetu

Every page on this site was built from Keyword Planner exports for India and six other countries, grouped into clusters and mapped one cluster per page. We do the same for clients as part of the SEO plan.