1. Collect seed topics in your customers' words
Seeds are the broad subjects your site can credibly cover: your products, the problems they solve, the jobs your readers are doing. The best seeds don't come from a tool. They come from sales calls, support tickets, reviews, Reddit threads and the search box on your own site. Write down the words customers use, not your internal jargon: people search “standing desk that goes low enough for short people”, not “height-adjustable ergonomic workstation”.
Aim for 5–15 seeds. If you have a site already, open Google Search Console's Performance report: queries you already get impressions for are the strongest seeds of all.
2. Expand each seed into real phrasings
Now widen each seed into the specific searches around it:
- Run it through the keyword ideas tool for AI-suggested phrasings labelled by intent.
- Wrap it in questions, audiences and formats with the long tail keyword generator.
- Type the seed plus a letter into Google and note the autocomplete suggestions, then open “People also ask” and “Related searches” on the results page.
- For services in several places, combine lists with the keyword mixer.
3. Clean the list
Merge everything and remove duplicates, brackets, capitalisation differences and junk with the keyword list cleaner. Add negative words for things you don't offer (“free”, “jobs”, “diy” if you're a service). A clean list of 300 is far more useful than a raw list of 3,000.
4. Cluster: one group, one page
This is the step most people skip, and it's why sites end up with five thin articles competing for the same search. Group keywords that one page could satisfy with the keyword clustering tool. Name each cluster after its clearest phrase; that's your working title.
5. Check intent against page one
For each cluster, decide what kind of page it needs. The search intent checker gives a fast first label; then search the main phrase and look. If Google shows how-to guides, write a guide. If it shows product grids, you need a category page. If it shows videos, consider making one. Mixed results mean mixed intent: cover the dominant one and nod to the other.
Try it on a pure why-query like “why does the moon have phases”: page one leans towards diagrams and explainers, the kind of page ahaboo's Moon-phase walkthrough is, and a shop would never break in.
6. Size it with real data
Only now do volumes matter, and they must come from a real source. Put the primary keyword of each cluster into Google Keyword Planner (free with a Google Ads account), check Search Console for impressions, and use Google Trends to spot seasonality. If you have Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz, their estimates add difficulty and traffic potential. Volumes are estimates everywhere; use them to separate 50 from 5,000, not 1,300 from 1,600. More on this on the search volume page.
For difficulty, look at who ranks. The keyword difficulty checker explains how scores are built and what to look for on page one.
7. Prioritise and assign
Rank clusters by demand, business value and how winnable they are; the prioritiser does this from the numbers you bring. Then give the top ones a target URL, a content brief and an owner. Track status in the template. Revisit quarterly: Search Console will show which new queries your pages started appearing for, and those become the next seeds.
Common mistakes
- Chasing the head term. “Keyword research” gets huge volume and is dominated by tool companies. The long-tail version that fits your audience is usually the better first target.
- One keyword, one page. Close variants belong together; see step 4.
- Trusting a volume without a source. If a tool can't say where a number came from, don't plan around it.
- Ignoring what you already rank for. Improving a page sitting at position 8–15 is often the fastest win available.