Keyword Research: From Discovery and Intent to a Content Plan

Keyword research is the work of finding the phrases your potential customers type into Google when they look for what you sell, measuring how often and with what intent those phrases are searched, and linking each one to a single page on your site. The short version: build a list from your customers' own language, check search volume and intent, group phrases with the same intent, and assign each group to one page. Below we walk through each step using free Google tools.

Why is keyword research still necessary?

Google no longer relies on exact word matches; it understands synonyms and different ways of saying the same thing. Even so, Google's own SEO Starter Guide advises you to think about the words users might use to find your content. That is because research answers not only "which word should I write?" but also "which page do I need?" If you do not know whether customers search for "price", "how to" or "comparison", you cannot build the right page.

How do you do keyword research step by step?

1. Build a seed list. Start with your product and service names, but the most valuable source is your customers' own language. Collect the questions your sales and support teams hear most often, the wording in quote request forms and your site's internal search logs. What you call "corporate identity" your customer may call "logo and business card design".
2. Expand the list. Type the seed terms into Google and look at the autocomplete suggestions, the "People also ask" questions on the results page and the related searches at the bottom. If you already have a site, the queries in Search Console are the most valuable source, because they are real searches for which Google already shows you.
3. Check search volume. Measure roughly how often each phrase is searched (the tools are in the next section).
4. Identify intent. Search the phrase on Google and look at what kinds of pages appear on the first page: guides, product pages, comparisons or map results?
5. Group. Put phrases that carry the same intent and bring up similar results on Google into one group. Each group is one page.
6. Prioritize. Rank each group by its contribution to your business, its level of competition and whether you already have a page for it.
7. Assign to pages and track. Link each group to a single URL; a few weeks after publishing, check in Search Console which queries that page appears for.

How do you check search volume?

There is no single exact figure for search volume; each tool measures something different. Treat the number as a direction, not an absolute truth.

• Google Ads Keyword Planner: Estimates the average monthly searches for a keyword and its close variants for the date range and location you choose. It is free, but you need to open a Google Ads account and complete setup, including billing details. It may not show estimates for very low-volume keywords.
• Google Trends: Does not give absolute search counts. It normalizes data against total searches in that region and period and scales it from 0 to 100. It is ideal for comparing two phrases and spotting seasonality and differences between cities.
• Google Search Console: This is your own site's real data. The Performance report shows impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate and average position for each query. Impressions also give you a sense of the query's volume.
• Paid SEO tools: These produce estimates from their own data sources. It is normal to see clear differences between tools for the same keyword.

A situation we often see with B2B services in Turkey: tools show very low volume, or none at all, for many phrases. That does not mean the phrase is worthless. A phrase such as "ERP consulting firm", searched a few times a month, can bring in more customers than a generic keyword searched thousands of times.

We compare the free and paid options in more detail in our article on how to find search volume.

How do you determine search intent?

Phrases on the same topic can want very different things. Four intents are usually distinguished:

• Informational: "what is search volume", "how does a payment gateway work". Expects a guide.
• Commercial investigation: "best CRM software", "VPS or VDS". Expects a comparison and selection criteria.
• Transactional: "corporate website price", "SEO agency quote". Expects a service or pricing page.
• Navigational: A search for a brand or a specific site.

The most reliable test is to run the search. If the entire first page is guides, it will be hard to rank there with a service page, and the reverse is also true.

How do you assess competition?

The "Competition" column in Keyword Planner describes how many advertisers show ads on that keyword, not how hard it is to rank organically. To understand organic competition, look at the results page again: are the top spots held by large portals, official bodies and long-established brands, or by sites of your size? Phrases where sites of your size rank and their content does not fully answer the question are the opportunities you can win fastest.

How do you group keywords and turn them into a content plan?

A simple rule works for grouping: if Google's first page is largely the same for two phrases, those two phrases are the subject of the same page. Writing separate articles for "keyword research" and "keyword analysis" makes two of your pages compete with each other.

Put the groups into a table: group name, main phrase, secondary phrases, intent, target URL and priority. That table is also your content calendar and your internal linking plan. Linking from a guide to the related service page is the most natural way to move a reader from informational to transactional intent.

In AI-assisted search, questions are longer and more conversational. We cover that different approach in our article on AEO and FAQs.

What are the most common mistakes?

• Targeting only the highest-volume keywords.
• Linking a service page to an informational keyword, or a blog post to a transactional keyword, without checking intent.
• Opening more than one page for the same intent.
• Repeating the keyword in the text more than needed. Google treats keyword stuffing as a violation of its spam policies, and it does not use the keywords meta tag.
• Doing the research once and never looking at it again.

In short: a checklist

• Did the seed list come from your customers' language?
• Have you checked the volume and intent of every phrase?
• Are phrases that share the same results page in a single group?
• Does each group have one target URL?
• Are you tracking results in Search Console regularly?

If you want to work through your keyword plan together with your site's existing pages, take a look at our SEO service.