Keyword Research for 2026: 3-Step Tutorial To Research Like A Pro

In SEO, the first way to get your content in front of the right customers is proper keyword research. So, in this video, I'll show a simple keyword research process that will help you find the best potential topics for your website and save you hours of work using just three simple steps. The first step is to gather keyword ideas. This implies putting yourself into your customer's shoes. What words and phrases might they use to find solutions to their problems? Here's the good news. There are multiple proven ways to uncover keyword opportunities. Use any single approach or combine them to build a solid pool of potential topics. Number one, brainstorm a list of keyword ideas. So, I'll open HF's keywords explorer and start from a seed keyword. A seed keyword is a broad term that your customers are typing into Google to search after your business. We're going to use them to find thousands of keyword ideas. For this video, I'll do keyword research for a hypothetical coffee equipment supplier. So, I'll type in coffee. Even better, I can ask AI to suggest more seed keywords related to coffee. And voila, you have 20 extra seed keywords to start your research. Hit enter. Then go to the matching terms report to expand on those keywords and see how many keyword ideas we can generate. and we've got over 20,000 keywords that you could potentially target. This might look overwhelming, but don't worry, you'll learn how to narrow them down a bit later. For now, select the keywords that you think might make sense to your business, or simply batch select and add them to a new keyword list. The next method is simple. Check for keywords that your website is already ranking for. If you already have a website, these keywords are a gold mine for brainstorming similar keyword ideas or improving underperforming pages. Enter your domain into HF site explorer and go to the organic keywords report. Then look for keywords that have recently dropped in rankings like best coffee maker with grinder. Click on it to get to the keywords overview. Then scroll down to the keyword ideas table. To win back those rankings, check the questions tab for additional questions related to the seed keyword. Then explore the also rank for and also talk about columns. These show related keywords that top ranking pages typically cover. By adding these related terms and questions to your content, you can strengthen your topical authority and climb back up the rankings. Found a promising keyword? Just add it to your keyword list and move on to the next dropped keyword. Now that you know what keywords your website is ranking for, let's spy on what your competitors are actually doing. In fact, this is one of the best ways to uncover hidden keyword opportunities that you're missing. Head over to Href's competitive analysis tool and run a content gap analysis. Simply paste your site at the top, then add your competitors below. This will show you your keywords where at least one of your competitors ranks in the top 10 search results, but you're nowhere to be found in the top 100 yet. Hit show keyword opportunities and boom, we've got 33,000 such keywords to help you close the gap. To make things easier, sort by the traffic column to see which of them actually drive visitors for each competitor. Take niche zero grinder for example. It brings in consistent traffic even at position six, so it goes straight onto our list. Here's another smart move. Study what keywords your competitors are paying for in Google Ads. Simply plug their domain inside Explorer and go to the paid keywords report. The thing is, if your competitors are willing to pay real ad dollars for these keywords, they're clearly profitable. So why not try ranking for them organically instead? to find the most expensive keywords they're bidding on. Sort them by the cost per click column, short for CPC. The higher the CPC, the more valuable that keyword likely is. And if you still have doubts, check the paid/organic ratio to see how much competition there is between ads and organic results. Take Beanbox Coffee for example. Our competitor is not only paying for ads, but also ranks organically on position one with a knowledge panel pulling in 96 visits each month. That's a clear signal this keyword converts. So, we'll add it to our list. Okay. Once you're happy with the keywords you've gathered, it's time to filter them to find out the best and most appropriate ones for your business. But with so many keywords, how do you know which ones to target? The answer, through keyword metrics. I'll show you how to use them to find high volume, low competition topics early on in the buying process that compete with websites in your league, which will help you gain more traffic and leads to level up your rankings. All right, so one of the most important keyword metrics is search intent. Now, search intent is the reason behind the searcher's quiry. This helps categorize keywords into four main groups. informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. The good news is that you can map them out to a traditional marketing funnel that reflects a customer's journey. So, in our case, you might be at the top of the funnel searching forformational keywords like how to make coffee at home. Then as you advance further down the buyer journey, you might switch to commercial keywords like Leit espresso machine or Leit versus Del Longi because you heard about these brands in an ad. Finally, when you're ready to buy, you might type in a transactional keyword like buy leit espresso machine. The goal here is to target keywords that are at the top and middle of the funnel to get in front of your customers early on in the buying process. By providing value upfront, you build brand awareness that pays off when they're ready to buy later. So, apply anformational and navigational filter to focus on this early stage keywords. Let's say cold brew coffee and click the search button to see the top 10 search results in Google. A quick skin through the titles shows most results are informational, which is perfect for our strategy. But let's dig deeper. If you click on identify intents, you can see exactly what people are searching for, plus the percentage of traffic going to each search intent. According to this data, you could write a focused article on how to make cold brew coffee or go for a comprehensive one and cover all angles to rank for multiple related keywords with a single piece of content. And trust me, you want this because a generated answers are taking into account multiple topics when surfacing your brand. Next up are two keyword metrics that work hand in hand. Search volume and keyword difficulty. Search volume shows how many times people search for a given keyword each month, while keyword difficulty tells you how hard it will be to rank for a keyword. Together, they help you find lowhanging fruit keywords, those with a decent search volume but lower competition that are easier to rank for. To find them, click on the presets in the top right corner and select the high volume, low competition use case. This will automatically apply a search volume of at least 500 searches, that's high volume, and a KD score of up to 10. That's the low competition part. Hit show results, and we have 457 keywords that are easy to rank for yet still bring consistent traffic on a monthly basis. But wait a minute, what's this column with positive deltas? This leads us to the next metric, growth rate. Here's something most people don't realize. Search volume is an annual average, which can be misleading when you're planning future search demand. A better strategy is to target keywords with a low search volume that are on the way to become more popular so you can catch them before they explode. That's where the growth metric comes in. Simply sort the growth rate column for the past 12 months into descending order to find trending topics right now. You can also set a minimum threshold in the filters to narrow things down even further. And if we take a closer look, we can spot some emerging espresso machine models that are just starting to gain traction. These are perfect candidates to target before they become mainstream. Now, Growth A shows how search volume changed over the past 12 months. But it twin metric growth forecast predicts which keywords will become popular in the next 12 months. So go ahead and sort the growth forecast column in descending order to see which keywords are expected to explode in the upcoming year. All right, we could keep narrowing down the list with even more filters and presets. But here's the truth. All this effort is useless if you're trying to compete with websites way out of your own league. And by that I mean websites with a higher domain authority than yours or domain rating as we measure it in ATFs. Think of keyword research like choosing your battles. You need to rank for keywords you can actually win among websites with a similar DR as yours before targeting the ultra competitive ones. Here's how you find the needle in the haststack. Click on lowest DR and filter for keywords where websites with a low DR of around 30 rank in the top five. If sites with similar authority to yours are ranking, you can probably rank there too without massive domain authority. Take Espresso versus Americano. If you check the SER overview, you'll see not one, not two, but three websites with a DR below 30 already ranking in the top 10 search results. By now, you might have hundreds, if not thousands of keyword ideas, but you probably don't want to create a page for each and every one of them. So, it's time for step number three. Cluster keywords by topics. Now, keyword clustering refers to grouping keywords with similar search intent. So, you can target them with one page instead of multiple pages. This deepens your topical authority, positioning your brand as a subject matter expert to Google, which in return boosts rankings and visibility for all related keywords. In ATUS, the process is straightforward. Click on clusters by parent topic to group keywords almost instantly. You'll see a tree map chart of all the clusters found. The larger the rectangle, the higher the search volume, plus key metrics to gouge your content ROI, like global search volume and traffic potential, aka how much traffic you could get if you were to rank on number one for that cluster. This is a much better metric than search volume alone because stop pages rank for more than just keywords and it also reflects traffic which is what we're after rather than just raw counts. To see the keywords in the cluster just click on the carrot. Now this was parent topic clustering which takes into account SER similarity. There's also term clustering which groups keywords by common words or phrases. But what if you're unsure whether to target two keywords on the same page or separately? Just search for a keyword in Keywords Explorer, let's say whipped coffee, and scroll down to its SER overview. Open the compare with drop-down and enter the other similar keyword, Dalona coffee. Then hit apply. What we're doing here is checking the SER similarity between the two keywords top 10 search results. And based on the low similarity score, you should probably target them separately. That said, you should cluster them if the score is high and make an educated guess when the score is medium. And that's how you do keyword research like an SEO pro. By now, you should have several keyword lists organized into topical clusters ready for content creation. And as your rankings improve and you build more topical authority, you'll unlock more opportunities to target even more competitive keywords. So, I'd recommend repeating this keyword research process every 3 to 6 months. The next step is to turn those keyword clusters into high ranking content. Watch the next video to learn how to do it.