Identifying target keywords for your content strategy in 6 steps

Identifying target keywords for your content strategy means finding the phrases your buyers already search, checking why they search them, and keeping only the ones your site can rank for and earn from. Six steps get you there: set a goal, build seeds, study competitors, read intent, score each term, then test it.

This guide is for anyone who plans blog posts and landing pages around search, from a small business owner writing their own site to an agency team running dozens. The method works for a five-page site and a five-hundred-page one. Google is still where most of that searching happens. HubSpot's research into how people search found that 31% use social media to search and 12% use AI chatbots, but 88% of people still use Google.

Why identifying target keywords for your content strategy goes wrong

Most keyword lists fail for the same reason: they are built around the first number a tool shows instead of around the business, and nothing filters the terms before the writing starts. The six steps in this guide are that filter.

Pick a short list on purpose

A target keyword is a search phrase you pick on purpose and build one page around. Your site may appear for thousands of queries. Only a few deserve a page of their own, because they match what you sell and what the reader wants at that moment.

The usual failure looks like this. Someone types a seed term into a tool, sorts by search volume and copies the top rows into a content calendar. A few months later the blog gets visits, but the visits do not turn into leads. Or the pages never reach page one, because every term on the list belonged to sites with far more authority.

Volume is the loudest number and the least useful one

Search volume tells you how much demand exists. It does not tell you whether you can win, or whether a visit is worth anything to you. BabyLoveGrowth's guide on this topic reports that over 70 percent of business owners admit they are unsure whether their keywords match what customers actually mean when they search. That gap is where content budgets leak.

Intent-first research pays off when it is done well. HubSpot writer Zoe Ashbridge credits her keyword process, which maps search intent to each stage of the buying cycle, with growing her clients' blog revenue by 254% year over year. The steps below follow the same logic, and if you want the fundamentals first, this beginner's guide to keyword research covers them.

Step 1: Start with a business goal, not a tool

If you open a keyword tool before you know what the content is for, you will collect terms that feel relevant but lead nowhere. Writing the goal down first tells you which kind of keyword to look for.

Match each goal to a keyword type

Business goal	Keyword type to favor	Example query	Page that should target it
Sell more of a product online	Transactional keywords with words like "buy" or "price"	buy standing desk online	Product or category page
Win more leads for a service	Commercial keywords that compare providers or add a location	best accountant for small business	Service page or comparison page
Build authority and reach buyers early	Informational keywords that start with "how to" or "what is"	how to do keyword research	Blog guide or tutorial
Support and keep existing customers	Navigational keywords that include your brand name	your brand name plus "login" or "pricing"	Help docs and login pages

Most businesses need more than one row. A product launch may need a transactional page for buyers who are ready now, plus guides for people still learning about the problem. The guides reach readers earlier and link through to the product page, which is where the sale happens.

Write down how your customers talk

Tools only show data for words you think to type, and your customers often use different words. Before any research, collect the exact phrases people use in:

• Sales calls and enquiry emails
• Support tickets and live chat logs
• Reviews of your business and of your competitors
• Questions in forums, social comments and community groups

A plumber may say "pipe relining" while the homeowner types "fix leaking pipe without digging". The homeowner's version is the one that gets searched. Keep a running list of these phrases. It becomes the seed list for Step 2.

Step 2: Build a seed list and expand it

Where seed keywords come from

Seed keywords are short, broad terms that describe what you do, such as "standing desk" or "tax accountant". Pull them from four places: the goal you set in Step 1, the customer phrases you collected, your product and service names, and the problems you solve. A handful per product or service line is enough to start.

Each seed then grows into a longer list of candidates. This walkthrough on finding keywords worth ranking for shows how to turn a seed into a shortlist without drowning in rows.

Expand your seeds with more than one tool

No single tool sees everything, so use two or three and compare what they return. The options below cover most small sites, and the limits shown come from TeenLife's roundup of keyword tools.

Tool	Free access	Best for	When to use it
Google Keyword Planner	Free, with fuller data once linked to a Google Ads account	Search volumes and advertiser bid ranges that hint at commercial value	Early, to size demand for each seed
Google Trends	Free	Seasonal swings and regional interest	Before you schedule content by month
AnswerThePublic	Three free searches a day	The questions people ask around a seed term	When planning guides and FAQ sections
Semrush Keyword Magic Tool	10 searches a day on a free account	Sorting related and semantic keywords into topic subgroups	When your list grows past what you can sort by hand
Ahrefs Keyword Generator	Free	Long-tail ideas by search engine (Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon) or by location	When you need ideas for one platform or one market

For long-tail ideas in one pass, paste a seed into the free keyword suggestions tool and keep only the phrases that match your goal.

Keep the long tail

Expansion turns up long phrases with small volumes, like "running shoes for women with high arches". It is tempting to delete them. Keep them. Gain's guide to keyword research notes that long-tail keywords often convert better and together make up a large share of organic traffic. They are also easier to rank for, because fewer strong pages target them. This guide on using long-tail keywords for more traffic and sales shows where they fit in a plan.

Step 3: Find the gaps your competitors leave

Competitor research turns guessing into evidence. The pages already ranking show which keywords bring traffic in your market, and where nobody has published anything good.

Choose the right competitors to study

BabyLoveGrowth's guide suggests starting with three to five direct competitors. Include two kinds:

• Business competitors are the companies your customers compare you with.
• Search competitors are the sites that rank for your seed terms, even if they sell something else. A software review blog can outrank every vendor for a "best software" query.

For content planning, search competitors often matter more, because they hold the positions you need to take.

What to pull from each competitor

For each one, note:

1. The keywords that bring them the most organic traffic
2. The page that ranks for each of those keywords, and what type of page it is
3. Keywords they rank for that you do not
4. Questions in your market they answer badly or not at all

Points three and four are your openings. A competitor keyword gap analysis lines up your rankings against theirs, so the missing terms show up as a list instead of a hunch.

Do not copy a competitor's list wholesale. They may rank for terms that do not fit your goal, or for terms they only hold because of years of backlinks. Treat their keywords as raw material for Steps 4 and 5.

Step 4: Read the search intent behind each keyword

Search intent is the reason behind a search, and two keywords with the same volume can call for completely different pages. Get the intent wrong and even a well-written page will struggle, because Google has already decided what kind of answer that query deserves.

Most guides sort intent into four types; the example queries below come from HubSpot's keyword guide.

Intent type	What the searcher wants	Example query	Content that fits
Informational	To learn something or solve a problem	how to do keyword research	A guide or tutorial
Navigational	To reach a specific website or page	semrush login	The brand's own homepage or login page
Commercial	To compare options before deciding	best keyword research tools	A comparison or "best of" list
Transactional	To buy or sign up now	buy keyword research tool	A product or pricing page

Check the results page, not only the label

Tools label intent automatically, and the label is an estimate. The results page is the evidence. Search each shortlisted keyword in a private browser window and study the top ten results:

• Are they blog posts, product pages, comparison lists or free tools?
• Do they answer a question in the first lines, or sell from the first screen?
• Is there a map pack or an AI Overview at the top?
• Are the top pages recent, or years old?

If most of the top results are "best of" lists, a single product page will have a hard time there, so either write the comparison or pick a different keyword for the product page. Whatever you build will be judged against Google's guidance on helpful, people-first content.

When a keyword has mixed intent

Some keywords split between two intents. A broad term such as "keyword research" might show beginner guides and tool homepages on the same results page, and in that case you match the format that holds most of the top five spots, then serve the other intent with a clear link. Guides can send readers to tools; tool pages rarely rank for a guide's query.

Step 5: Score difficulty, volume and value together

You now have a shortlist that fits your goal and has a clear intent. This step decides which keywords you go after first.

Search volume: how much demand there is

HubSpot's keyword guide gives these benchmarks for average monthly searches:

• 10 to 100: low volume, but often highly specific and likely to convert
• 100 to 1,000: the sweet spot for most businesses starting out
• 1,000 to 10,000: competitive, but worthwhile for established sites
• 10,000 and up: highly competitive, and needs strong authority

Higher is not always better. As HubSpot's guide points out, a keyword with 10,000 searches might be out of reach, while one with 500 searches could bring qualified visitors almost straight away.

Keyword difficulty: how hard the fight is

Difficulty scores run from 0 to 100 in most tools and are based mainly on the authority of the sites already ranking. Here is how HubSpot's guidelines read them:

Difficulty score	Competition level	What ranking usually takes	Realistic for
0 to 30	Low	A focused, useful page on a relevant site	New sites can compete
31 to 60	Medium	Some existing authority plus quality content	Sites with a track record of content
61 to 80	High	Strong domain authority and backlinks	Established sites with a solid link profile
81 to 100	Very high	Outranking major brands and authoritative sites	Major brands, while smaller sites target a longer variant

For a new site, HubSpot suggests keywords with decent volume (100 to 1,000 searches) and difficulty under 40, while noting that harder terms are still fair game if you can wait longer for results. This explainer on keyword difficulty and how to pick winnable terms goes further into reading the score. To see a term's difficulty and intent next to its volume, run it through the free keyword checker.

Cost per click: a clue to commercial value

Advertisers pay a cost per click (CPC) for each visit a keyword sends them. The number comes from paid search, but it tells content teams something useful. HubSpot's guide puts it plainly: high CPC often indicates commercial value, and if businesses pay $20 per click, that keyword drives revenue. When a keyword has both high CPC and high advertiser competition, it is usually a money keyword. A big-volume term with almost no ad spend is often searched by curious people rather than buyers.

Put every factor in one sheet

Give each shortlisted keyword one row in a spreadsheet, with a column for each factor:

1. Relevance to what you sell
2. Intent match to a page you can realistically build
3. Monthly search volume
4. Difficulty compared with your site's authority
5. CPC or another sign of value

Rank the keywords that score highest on relevance and intent first, then break ties on difficulty and value. A low-volume phrase that describes exactly what you sell will usually earn more than a popular term that only brushes past it, which is why relevance comes before volume in the sheet.

Keep the first batch small. HubSpot recommends starting with 10 to 20 keywords at most, because excellent content for a few keywords beats mediocre content for hundreds.

Step 6: Map, test and revisit your keyword targets

Give every page one primary keyword

Assign each keyword to exactly one page. Close variants, such as "keyword research tool" and "keyword research software", belong on the same page as secondary keywords. When two of your pages chase the same primary keyword, they compete with each other, and Google often ranks neither of them well.

Grouping by hand slows down once the list passes a few dozen terms. A keyword clustering tool sorts a long list into topic groups, and each group becomes one page with one primary keyword plus its supporting variants.

Use the keyword naturally on the page

Put the primary keyword in the title, the H1, the opening paragraph and one or two subheadings, then write for the reader. Senuto's guide puts acceptable keyword density at roughly 1-3%, and the top of that range is best treated as a ceiling. Google's spam policies list keyword stuffing as a violation, and a phrase repeated until the sentence breaks reads badly to people as well.

Test each choice with real data

A keyword is a hypothesis until a page ranks for it. After publishing, watch these in Google Search Console:

• Which queries the page actually appears for, which are often not the ones you picked
• Its average position over several weeks
• Its click-through rate from the results page
• Whether visitors take the action you wanted

If the page ranks for a better phrase than the one you targeted, move the title and headings toward it. If it stalls, check the intent again before you rewrite anything.

Revisit the list every six or 12 months

Search shifts under you. TeenLife notes that Google updated its core search algorithms seven times in 2024, including four core updates and three spam updates, and recommends revisiting your keyword strategy every six or 12 months. That review is also the moment to fold in new products and the questions customers have started asking. Treat identifying target keywords for your content strategy as a standing review on your calendar, and the list stays useful long after the first pages go live.

How AI search changes which keywords you pick

AI Overviews and chatbots now answer many questions on the results page itself. HubSpot's guide notes that a page can rank first on Google and still get zero clicks when an AI Overview answers the query directly. That shifts which keywords you value and how you write for them, but the research itself still sets the plan.

• Favor keywords with a next step. Quick facts get answered in the summary. Searches that need a comparison, a tool, a quote or a local provider still send clicks.
• Answer early. Put a clear, self-contained answer in the first lines of the page, then add the detail. A passage that makes sense on its own is easier for an AI answer to quote.
• Plan for more than one platform. With 31% of people searching on social media and 12% on AI chatbots, per HubSpot, the same questions come up on TikTok and in ChatGPT. Your keyword list is still the map for all of them.
• Treat questions as keywords. The question-style terms that tools like AnswerThePublic surface often read like the prompts people type into chatbots, so a page that answers them well can serve both.

Worked examples make this concrete. These 10 keyword research examples show how different kinds of businesses turned a keyword list into pages that rank.

Common mistakes when choosing target keywords

• Picking by volume alone. Big numbers pull you toward terms you cannot win or that do not sell.
• Skipping the results page. A tool's intent label is a guess until you have seen what ranks.
• Chasing head terms on a young site. Short, broad terms like "shoes" or "travel" are highly competitive and hard to rank for.
• Two pages, one keyword. Your own pages split the signals, and neither ranks well.
• Using your jargon instead of theirs. Customers search in their own words, not your internal product names.
• Setting the list and forgetting it. Search habits and Google's systems both change within a year.

Can you do keyword research yourself?

Yes, for most small sites. With free tools, a spreadsheet and the six steps above, a single-location business with a handful of services can build a sound list of 10 to 20 target keywords on its own. The basics of picking keywords you can actually win are enough to get the first pages live.

Bring in outside help when:

• You have hundreds of pages and suspect some of them compete for the same terms
• You target several countries or languages
• Rankings dropped after a Google update and you cannot see why
• You need keyword targets tied to revenue in a report for a client or a board

At that scale, a team or a platform that joins keyword data to a crawl of your own site saves time and catches overlaps that are easy to miss by hand.

FAQs

How many target keywords should a content strategy start with?

Start small. HubSpot's guide suggests 10 to 20 keywords at most for a first batch, so each one gets a strong page. Give every page one primary keyword plus a few close variants, and add more once the first pages start to rank.

How long does identifying target keywords for your content strategy take?

For a small site with a clear goal, the first pass takes days rather than weeks, as long as the shortlist stays short. After that, a review every six or 12 months keeps the list current as competitors and Google's systems change.

What keyword difficulty should a new website target?

HubSpot's guidelines say new sites can compete in the 0 to 30 range. The same guide suggests aiming for difficulty under 40 with 100 to 1,000 monthly searches. Harder terms are possible, but expect slower results.

Is it worth targeting keywords with very low search volume?

Often, yes. HubSpot describes terms with 10 to 100 monthly searches as low volume but often highly specific and convertible. If customers ask a question in sales calls or support tickets, it can deserve a page even when a tool shows little demand.

What is the difference between a primary keyword and a secondary keyword?

The primary keyword is the one phrase a page is built to rank for, and it goes in the title and the H1. Secondary keywords are close variants and related questions on the same page, which widen the searches it can rank for without creating a second page that competes with the first.

Talk to the team about your keyword plan

Browse this sample SEO report to see what a finished audit looks like, page by page. Then talk to the team about identifying target keywords for your content strategy using your own site's data.

Resources / References

1. HubSpot's research into how people search
2. TeenLife's roundup of keyword tools
3. helpful, people-first content
4. Senuto's guide
5. spam policies
6. Google Search Console

Sources

• Mastering Keyword Research for Effective Content Marketing
• Identifying Target Keywords for Your 2025 Content Strategy
• What a decade in SEO taught me about keyword research ...
• Integrating keywords with content marketing strategies
• The Importance of Keywords and Keyword Strategy