Keyword Research: The Basics You Actually Need

The most common SEO mistake is not technical. It is writing content nobody searches for. A business writes ten articles "from the gut", six months pass, no traffic arrives — and they conclude that "SEO does not work". The real problem: they wrote about topics nobody types into Google. Keyword research is how you avoid that — instead of guessing, you check what people actually search for.

Three things to measure for every keyword

• Search volume: how many people type the query each month. "Hosting" gets thousands of searches; "hosting for a law firm" maybe a dozen — but that dozen is worth more if you are exactly the solution.
• Competition: who already sits on page one. If it is Wikipedia and major portals, a new site has almost no chance there. If it is forums and thin articles — that is an opening.
• Intent: what the searcher actually wants. "What is a CDN" — they want to learn. "CDN hosting price" — they want to buy. The first query calls for a blog post, the second for a sales page. Mix them up and you will rank for neither.

Long-tail: where small sites win

Queries of 4+ words ("how much does a restaurant website cost") have small individual volume, but there is an enormous number of them, competition is weak, and intent is precise. For a new or small site, long-tail is the only realistic strategy: twenty articles each targeting 50–100 monthly searches bring more customers than one article chasing a 5,000-search keyword you will never rank for.

The step-by-step process, with free tools

• 1. List topics from your business: the 10–15 questions customers ask you most often. That is gold — if they ask you, they ask Google too.
• 2. Google autocomplete: type a topic and watch what Google suggests. Those are real searches by real people.
• 3. "People also ask" and related searches at the bottom of the results — ready-made ideas for subheadings and new articles.
• 4. Google Keyword Planner (free with a Google Ads account) — gives rough volumes so you can separate 10-search topics from 1,000-search topics.
• 5. Search Console (if your site already exists) — shows queries where you already appear in positions 8–20. Those are your fastest wins: the article already ranks, it just needs expanding and strengthening.

How to pick the winners

For every candidate keyword, open page one of Google and ask yourself two questions: can I write something better than what is there, and could the person typing this become my customer? Two yeses — write it. One no — next keyword. One article targets one main keyword plus 3–5 close variations; do not stretch a single post across ten topics.

Mistakes we see constantly

• Chasing the biggest keywords ("hosting", "website") instead of winnable long-tail queries.
• Ignoring intent — a sales page for an informational query, or the reverse.
• Doing research once and never again — demand shifts; revisit at least twice a year.

And the technical footnote: once you find the right keywords and write the content, your site has to deliver it. Loading speed affects both rankings and whether visitors stay. Our SEO hosting is built precisely for sites that live off search — NVMe storage, CDN and SSL included, with plans from €4.20 a month.