Keyword Research: A Step-by-Step Guide, Tools and Template

Keyword research is the process of finding out which phrases your customers type into Google, how often they search for them and which page of your website should answer each one. The result is a spreadsheet you use to plan your site structure, your content and your PPC campaigns – based on data instead of guesswork.

How to do keyword research in seven steps:

1. 1Collect – gather phrases from Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Search Console, autocomplete and your competitors.
2. 2Clean – remove duplicates, typos and queries that clearly have nothing to do with your business.
3. 3Intent – decide what the searcher wants: information, a comparison or a purchase.
4. 4Relevance – score each keyword on a scale of 1–5 (1 = most important, 5 = delete).
5. 5Categorise – sort keywords into a category → subcategory tree.
6. 6Map – assign each keyword to exactly one landing page, with its current position and a proposed title.
7. 7Prioritise – order the work by search volume, relevance and difficulty.

What keyword research is and why to do it before a website or campaign

Good keyword research answers three questions: what people in your market search for, how many of those searches there are, and which page will answer them. Google's own SEO Starter Guide advises you to think about the words a user might search for to find your content. Keyword analysis turns that into a repeatable process.

Why do it at the start rather than after launch? Menus, URLs and e-commerce categories are expensive to change once a site is live. If you find out that people search for “custom kitchens Prague” but your site only has a generic “Products” page, you end up rebuilding. Done upfront, the research tells you which pages the site needs before anyone starts designing it. In PPC, data saves you paying for clicks that never turn into enquiries.

It is not about repeating phrases: Google understands synonyms, and keyword stuffing is against its spam policies. The research tells you what to write about and where it belongs.

Step 1: Collect keywords from several sources

No tool has complete data, so we merge several sources into one spreadsheet:

• Google Keyword Planner – a free tool inside Google Ads that suggests keywords and shows average monthly searches. It requires a Google Ads account with billing details, but no running campaign. Without regular ad spend you usually see only ranges (e.g. 100–1K), not exact figures.
• Ahrefs – strong for competitor analysis: it shows which keywords competing sites rank for and estimates the difficulty of each keyword (Keyword Difficulty) on a scale of 0–100.
• Google Search Console – the only source of real data about your own site: queries, impressions, clicks and average position for the last 16 months. It shows keywords you appear for but get few clicks on.
• Autocomplete and related questions – real queries from Google's suggestions and “People also ask”, often long and specific.
• Local data – for Czech and Slovak markets we add Marketing Miner, which focuses on data for these countries.
• Competitors – the menus, categories and blogs of 3–5 competitors who actually rank at the top.

What each tool does and how they compare is covered in our overview of SEO tools for research and audits.

Step 2: Clean and merge

Before you score anything, do four things with the raw list:

• Remove duplicates from the merged exports.
• Merge variants with the same meaning: spelling variants, typos and word order usually belong to one phrase and one page.
• Drop unrelated meanings – queries with “keyword” often come from programmers looking for keywords in Java or C.
• Take search volume from one source so the numbers are comparable.

Step 3: Search intent

The same topic can have different intents. Someone searching “how to do keyword research” wants a guide. Someone searching “pellet boiler price” is close to buying. Intent decides which type of page answers the query:

Quick check: search the keyword and look at page one. If it is all articles, a product page will struggle there, and vice versa.

Step 4: Keyword analysis by relevance – scoring 1–5

This is the core of the work and what separates keyword analysis from a plain tool export. Each keyword gets a score based on its importance for your business:

Why five groups and not yes/no? Group 2 feeds the blog, which reaches people earlier in their decision. Group 3 keeps interesting keywords from being deleted just because they are not a priority now. Group 4 has direct financial value – see below.

Do not score by search volume. A keyword with 50 monthly searches can be a 1 because the people searching are ready to order, while a keyword with 5,000 searches can be a 5.

Step 5: Categorise into categories and subcategories

Keywords in groups 1–3 are sorted into two levels: category I (main topic, e.g. “Websites”) and category II (subtopic, e.g. “Pricing” or “Redesign”). The site structure can be read almost directly from this tree: category I items become menu items, category II items become subpages or articles.

For an online store, this shows whether your categories match how people search – for example by material rather than by manufacturer.

Step 6: Keyword mapping and preventing cannibalization

Each keyword is assigned to exactly one landing page. If no suitable page exists, we note a proposal for a new one. We then add the current position (from Search Console or Ahrefs) and a proposed title for that page.

The rule that follows, and that we stick to when writing: a page's text targets only the keywords the research assigned to it. Even if the page for another keyword does not exist yet, we do not add that keyword elsewhere “for now”. Once the new page launches, two URLs would compete for the same query. This is keyword cannibalization: Google may alternate between the pages, and often neither ranks as well as one strong page would.

On an existing site, Search Console reveals cannibalization: filter by a query and check how many different pages collect impressions for it. If there are several, pick the main one and rewrite or merge the others.

Step 7: Prioritise – volume × relevance × difficulty

Finally, you need to know where to start. We combine three factors:

• Search volume – how many people search for the phrase each month.
• Relevance – group 1 comes before groups 2 and 3.
• Difficulty – how strong the pages ranking for the keyword are. Ahrefs expresses this as Keyword Difficulty; in practice you confirm it by looking at the search results.

The fastest results usually come from group 1 keywords where you already rank in positions 5–20. The page exists and often only needs a better title, more content or internal links. New pages for difficult keywords are a long-term investment.

Keyword research template

The output of our research is one spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel), one keyword per row, with seven columns: keyword, search volume (from one source), relevance 1–5, category I and II, landing page (URL or proposed new page), current position and proposed title. An example for a web design studio (volumes and positions are illustrative, not real data):

In practice this is one filterable sheet. Filtering by “landing page = X” gives the copywriter a brief: exactly these keywords and no others.

What to do with the output

• Site structure – categories I and II plus the proposed new pages give you the menu and URL map. When we build a website, this is the starting point for the sitemap.
• Content plan – group 2 keywords feed articles and glossary entries. Each article gets its own set of keywords; how to turn that into text that works for people and Google is covered in our article on SEO copywriting.
• Optimising existing pages – on pages with assigned keywords, update the title according to the proposal, then the headings and content. If you are not sure what technical state the site is in, start with a website SEO audit.
• Negative keywords for PPC – group 4 goes straight into the negative keyword list in Google Ads. Your ads then stop showing for queries like “free”, “tutorial” or “jobs” if they never lead to orders. We handle campaign setup and management as part of PPC campaign management.

Common mistakes

• Choosing by volume – the most searched keyword in a field tends to be generic and brings people who do not buy.
• One keyword on several pages – leads to cannibalization, see step 6.
• Research left in a drawer – if nobody uses the spreadsheet, the money was wasted.
• Doing it once – search volume and competition change. It makes sense to update the research when preparing a new section of the site, or once a year.

When it makes sense to bring in a specialist

You can do basic keyword research for a small site with one service yourself. A specialist makes sense when you are building a new website or online store with dozens of categories, when the site is losing traffic and you do not know why, or when you want the research to serve directly as the brief for site structure, copy and PPC. The time invested pays back because the site does not need rebuilding after launch.

Keyword research is the first step of our SEO services and of every new website we build. Over 8+ years and 50+ projects we have refined the method so the output goes straight into production. If you want to discuss your site, get in touch through our contact form.