What Are SEO Keywords? A Beginner’s Guide

In search engine optimization (SEO), keywords are terms or phrases that you want search engines like Google and Bing to rank your website highly for.

A keyword could be a very short phrase with a broad definition — possibly only one or two words, like “email marketing” — or something much more specific, like “best project management software for lawyers.”

In SEO, you’ll create webpages designed to target specific keywords, and you’ll optimize those pages so they have the best chance of appearing high on search engine results pages (SERPs). You can target keywords with many types of pages, including blog posts, product pages, and your homepage.

I’d argue that identifying the right keywords to target is the most important step in building an SEO strategy, and you’ll begin keyword research very early on in that process.

There are many different types of keywords, varying degrees of competition, and a few ways to identify the right keywords to target. Then once you’ve identified a keyword, you’ll need to use it appropriately within your webpage. And you’ll ultimately need to track the performance of your webpages for the keywords you want to rank for. 

I’ll walk you through all of this and more. Let’s jump in!

Types of Keywords

Keywords come in varying shapes and sizes, and there are two types of keywords that you’ll want to think about when you’re planning your strategy.

Head Terms

A head term is a broad keyword, typically one to three words long. Head terms usually have higher search volume and are often more competitive — more difficult to rank highly for in search engines.

For example, the keyword “running shoes” would be a head term. This short, two-word phrase gets a lot of searches and is fairly competitive:

Given that head terms are broad, it’s often hard to know exactly what the searcher is looking for, and you’ll need to build a webpage that serves a variety of different search intents.

Long-Tail Keywords

Most folks just getting started with SEO initially focus on long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is a more specific keyword, typically three to five words long, and it typically has a lower search volume and is less competitive.

For example, a keyword like “best running shoes for plantar fasciitis” is more specific:

This keyword still gets a meaningful amount of monthly searches, but there’s a lot less competition for it, meaning that a new website will be able to rank for it faster. The intent is also very clear, and we could build a webpage for this very specific topic.

There are two types of long-tail keywords: supporting and topical. A supporting keyword is a specific keyword that supports, or should be targeted on the same page as, a primary keyword, and a topical keyword is a specific keyword that should be targeted with its own unique page. In other words, it is its own primary keyword.

When building out your website, you’ll likely want to create webpages for both head terms and long-tail keywords. It will likely take longer to drive traffic with head terms, given their higher difficulty, but over the long run, these keywords have the potential to drive significant traffic to your website. With long-tail keywords, you’ll likely be able to drive traffic faster, but you’ll also likely need many more webpages specific to those keywords.

Understanding Keyword Metrics

There are a few keyword metrics that you should know about and that you’ll likely encounter during your keyword research.

Keyword Search Volume

This is typically an estimate of the number of searches a keyword gets per month on Google’s search engine. 

Again, search volumes are only estimates, and the actual number of searches for a given keyword is typically a bit higher than what you’ll see in keyword research tools like Positional, Semrush, and Ahrefs.

Keyword Difficulty

A keyword difficulty score is meant to show how hard it will be for a page to rank highly on SERPs for a keyword. It’s typically expressed as a numerical score from 0 to 100, with a 100 being the most competitive keyword and a 0 being the easiest possible keyword.

This score is typically calculated by looking at the domain and page authority of the top-performing search results for that keyword today. The measurement is also often referred to as competition.

Intent

Many keyword research tools will provide you with intent information or help you quickly understand what searchers are trying to achieve with a specific search. 

Most keyword research tools will bucket intent into four categories: transactional, navigational, informational, and commercial.

How to Find Keywords

There are many different approaches to finding the right keywords to target. I’d encourage you to use these methods in combination.

Listen to Your Customers

Yes, there are tools that you can use to identify keywords to target. But before you sign up for a new SEO tool, I’d recommend thinking critically about the questions that you hear frequently from your customers or prospective customers.

Odds are, if you keep getting the same question, there is a keyword to be found within that question.

That is where we started with our blog. The first 20 to 30 pieces of content that I wrote were direct answers to customer questions that I kept getting over and over again. In this case, I was making the bet that other potential customers had similar questions. I was also able to use this content to support our existing customers and use it in the sales process.

You can review your customer support logs and call transcripts, and talk with other members of your team to identify core questions that just keep popping up.

Look at Your Competitors

This is where I’ll typically start using an SEO tool. Using a tool like Positional’s Keyword Tracking toolset, or Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you can view the keywords that competitive websites are currently ranking for.

For example, given that we compete with Mangools, I might plug Mangools into our Keyword Tracking toolset to see the keywords that they’re ranking for:

You can also view the top pages on their website by traffic, and add filters on metrics like monthly search volume and competition. You could filter traffic value to find the most valuable webpages on a competitor's website.

I would start by building a list of five to ten competitors, direct and indirect competitors, and looking for inspiration there.

Iterate Within a Keyword Research Tool

Most SEO tools have a plug-and-play feature that lets you enter keyword phrases directly, shows you the relevant metrics for those keywords, and provides some related keywords that you might want to target.

You could use Positional’s Keyword Research toolset or a tool like Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer for this.

For example, here I’ve entered a very broad keyword, “content marketing,” and I can see the data for this keyword, as well as a large number of suggested keyword ideas, or long-tail keywords related to that keyword:

My advice would be to start broad within a plug-and-play keyword research tool and then to get more specific as you do your keyword research.

Identify Popular Questions to Address

There are a lot of SERP features, or elements of a search engine results page, that are different from the traditional ten blue links. One of my favorite SERP features is People Also Ask (PAA). These are questions that searchers have, related to a given topic, and these questions are often long-tail keywords.

You can view these PAA questions directly in search results after searching, and you can view them in most keyword research tools.

For example, in Positional, you can view PAA questions quickly for any keyword, inside the Questions tab in the Keyword Research tool:

Look at Autocomplete Keywords

Have you ever been typing in Google’s search bar and seen a list of suggestions appear?

These are known as autocomplete keywords. Autocomplete keywords are provided by Google directly, are often long-tail keywords, and give us clues as to what people are searching for.

You can view autocomplete keywords directly in the search engine:

And most SEO tools will provide them, too, enriched with relevant keyword metrics:

Use Google Search Console to Identify Keywords You Already Rank — But Could Be Ranking Better — For

If your website is already ranking for some keywords, you could look to Google Search Console (GSC) for inspiration.

In GSC, Google provides a list of queries or keywords that your website is ranking for:

One approach is to look at the keywords your webpages are ranking for, albeit not that well, and then to create more specific webpages to serve some of the keywords that your existing pages might not be targeting directly.

If you’re already ranking for a long-tail keyword, even if you’re not ranking that well, you’ll likely be able to rank much better for it with a dedicated webpage on your website that serves that specific keyword.

How to Choose the Right Keywords

Determine the Primary Keyword First

For each webpage on your website, there will be a primary keyword. Your primary keyword is the most searched version of a grouping of similar keywords.

As you’re doing your keyword research, you might notice that two keywords are very similar but slightly different. The primary keyword would be the version of the keyword that has a higher search volume.

If you’re ever confused as to when to combine keywords, or whether a long-tail keyword is supporting another, more popular head term, the easiest thing to do is to search for those two keywords. If the search results are substantially identical, that would tell you to combine or group those two keywords. You could also use a keyword clustering tool to do this grouping and splitting for you.

One thing to note: If when you are doing your keyword research you are discouraged because a keyword doesn’t have the search volume that you expected, it might be that there are a large number of supporting long-tail keywords that need to be grouped together, and that the actual search volume for that grouping of keywords is a lot higher than the individual search volume for any one specific keyword variant.

Think Critically About the Different Stages of the Funnel

You’ll want to think about the different stages of the funnel that you want to target.

For example, “content marketing” is a very evergreen keyword, and a keyword that would serve the top of the funnel for our website.

By contrast, something more specific, like “content marketing tools,” would be further down the funnel, given that someone is looking for a specific tool, potentially ours.

And then you’ve got keywords that are closely related to your competitors. In our case, keywords like “Ahrefs alternatives” or “Ahrefs vs. Surfer” would be keywords at the bottom of the funnel, where searchers are looking to compare different products similar to ours.

In the very beginning, you might want to focus on lower-competition keywords that are toward the bottom of the funnel. These keywords are going to be easier to rank for, and (hopefully) they’ll drive business outcomes sooner.

But you’ll also want to spend time developing webpages and content for the top and middle of the funnel, as this traffic can still be quite valuable, and it is often helpful for building topical authority.

Prioritize Keywords Based on Metrics

In the very beginning, you’ll want to focus on keywords that have lower competition or keyword difficulty scores. My general advice is to use a cutoff of 65 or 70, and to target keywords with difficulty scores below that threshold. Depending on the SEO tool you’re using, difficulty scores will vary, but these metrics are generally pretty similar between popular tools.

Keywords with a difficulty score in the 20s, 30s, or 40s would be very easy to rank for, and it might make sense to target these keywords out of the gate, to show some early signs of SEO success.

You’ll of course want to balance search volume alongside difficulty. A keyword might be very easy, but if no one is searching for it, it might make sense to deprioritize it — and to start with keywords that could drive a more significant amount of traffic to your website.

It is a balancing act between difficulty, search volume, intent, and the value of that traffic to your website.

Building the Right Type of Page for a Keyword

A question that I always get asked is “What type of webpage should I use for this keyword?”

And it’s a good question.

Depending on the keyword, you might want to create a blog post, a product page, or something else entirely.

To determine the right type of webpage to create for a given keyword, the easiest thing to do is search for that keyword and determine what types of webpages are performing well for that keyword today.

For example, for the keyword “what is SEO,” it’s clear that the best-performing search results are blog posts:

So if you wanted to target this keyword, you’d want to create a blog post. It would be very hard to rank a product page or a homepage for a keyword like this.

On the other hand, for the keyword “credit card,” the top search results are product pages:

So you’d want to create a product or landing page to service this keyword.

In SEO, you’ll often hear about search intent or the reason that someone is doing a particular search. We want to align the purpose of our webpage with that reason and deliver on the search intent. The format and type of our webpage will play a big role in doing that.

If the search results for a specific keyword are very diverse, and you see a combination of blog posts, product pages, and even homepages ranking for it, you might be able to choose the type of webpage to build. When in doubt, I’ll typically start with a product webpage, and then if that webpage doesn’t perform, I’ll start test ranking a blog post or content page.

How to Use Keywords Effectively

When building your webpages, you’ll want to use keywords strategically in certain areas. While Google says that you don’t necessarily need to use keywords on purpose and that their algorithms are smart enough to determine which keywords your webpages should rank for, I’m all about making Google’s life as easy as possible.

Using Your Primary Keyword in Key Spots

There are a few places where you’ll certainly want to use your primary keyword.

H1

An H1 is the HTML tag that denotes the webpage’s primary title. You’ll want to use your primary keyword, or a close variation, within the H1 of your webpage.

Title Tag

Your title tag is the title of your webpage that gets pulled into SERPs. The title tag is going to be the first thing that a user sees before clicking on your search result. You should incorporate your primary keyword in your title tag and make it engaging, so searchers will want to click on your result.

URL Slug

Your slug provides context to searchers and search engine crawlers. The slug is the portion of your URL after the final backslash. You’ll want to use your primary keyword as the URL slug, as we’ve done clearly with this piece of content.

Optimizing for Keyword Variations and Supporting Long-Tail Keywords

In your keyword research process, you’ll likely identify keyword variants and supporting long-tail keywords alongside your primary keywords.

You’ll want to incorporate these keyword variations into your webpage and within core elements, including your H2s, H3s, and H4s.

You could also use a content optimization tool, like Positional's Optimize, Clearscope, or Surfer, to get suggestions as to which keywords to include in your webpage:

These tools analyze top-performing search results today and work to identify the keyword phrases that are included within those top-ranking search results. From there, they will provide you with suggested counts or the number of times you should use particular keywords within your webpage. These tools will also provide recommendations for which keyword variants to include in your header elements.

Tracking Keyword Performance 

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool provided by Google that allows users to view search engine performance and diagnose potential problems with their website. 

If you’re just getting started with SEO, you’ll want to set up GSC pretty early on to start collecting data. You can track the performance of specific URLs for specific keywords directly in GSC.

GSC provides you with keyword performance data, including a list of keywords, or, as they call them, queries, that your website is appearing for:

GSC will also provide you with average ranking position, click-through rate, and traffic data.

While most teams start with just GSC, adding another keyword tracking toolset to your arsenal may make sense, especially if you’ve got a very large website that’s ranking for a large number of keywords. Tools like Positional, Semrush, and Ahrefs provide keyword tracking features that allow you to track your ranking. 

These tools also supplement GSC by providing tracking for SERP features, like featured snippets and People Also Ask, and they allow you to quickly identify issues like keyword cannibalization.

6 Tools for Keyword Research

• Positional: Offers a number of tools and workflows for keyword research and tracking, including its Competitor Research toolset. Unique in that it provides core keyword tools alongside tools for content optimization, technical SEO, and content analytics. Positional is a good option if you’re just starting with SEO.‍
• Semrush: The most popular SEO tool, offering a wide array of capabilities for keyword research and tracking. Using Semrush’s interface takes some practice, but the tool provides really granular keyword insights. Semrush has a host of other tools, too, including tools for social media and backlink tracking.‍
• Ahrefs: A great toolset for keyword research, and arguably the company with the best source of keyword metrics. The company’s Site Explorer can be used to track keyword performance for your website and competitors, and their Keyword Explorer is great for doing in-depth keyword research.
• ‍Mangools: An up-and-coming keyword research toolset with lower-cost pricing plans. If you’re looking for an entry-level tool, Mangools provides just that, and it includes the core metrics that you need to decide which keywords to target.
• ‍Google Keyword Planner: Google’s free-to-use keyword research toolset, used primarily for Google Ads. It’s great because it’s free, but it doesn’t provide granular keyword data for long-tail keywords, and you can’t use it to conduct competitor research. 
• ‍Google Trends: Google’s free tool for spotting keyword trends and the changes in popularity for different keywords over time. Great for finding new ideas and trending topics; however, the data is presented relatively and not with granular metrics for search volume or competition.

Final Thoughts

Most people make SEO seem too complicated. You really just need to pick the right keywords and create great webpages to serve them.

If you do those two things right, you are 80% of the way there.

Keywords come in different shapes and sizes; some are more popular than others, and some are more competitive.

You should balance these metrics alongside relevance to your business and the KPIs that you’re using to measure success.

When starting your keyword research process, you should use a combination of different approaches, such as listening to your customers' questions, targeting keywords that your competitors are already ranking well for, and iterating within a keyword research tool.

Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to target, make sure to use them thoughtfully in the core elements of your webpage and throughout the webpage’s content. Also, you have to build the right type of webpage, whether it be a product page, a blog page, or something else entirely, to have the best chance of ranking.