Keyword Research: What It Is and How It’s Done

Keyword research is how you build a keyword map: a list of the searches people use in Google to find what you sell, matched to the pages of your site. For each search, the map records how many times a month people type it, what they want (to buy or to learn) and which page answers it. It tells you which pages your site needs, what to write on them and which searches to buy in ads.

Below, we’ll walk through how that list is collected, cleaned up and turned into a site structure. Our example is the keyword map behind this very site, with real numbers. PR Studio started as a Russian-language site, so the map was built on Russian search data; we’ve translated the queries.

What keyword research is, in plain English

It’s a map of demand. It shows not what you call your services, but what your customers call them. The owner writes “web resource development” on the site, while people type “website development” and “website design”. If no page on the site answers in their words, Google has nothing to show them.

One row of the map looks like this: the search, its volume, the intent and the page. For example, in our map “website development” gets 1,546 searches a month, the person wants to hire someone, and the search leads to our website development page. Hundreds or thousands of rows like that make up the map.

You don’t need it only for SEO. Your Google Ads campaigns are built from it too, and the junk you find while cleaning it becomes negative keywords that protect your ad budget.

Where keywords come from

There are four sources. Each one gives you something the others don’t.

Google Keyword Planner

A free tool inside your Google Ads account. Enter a word or your website, and it suggests related searches with their average monthly volume and bid estimates. It’s the main source of both keywords and search volume. You can choose a location and look at monthly trends to spot seasonality.

Google autocomplete

The suggestions that drop down under the search bar as you type. They show how people really phrase their searches: in what order they put the words, what details they add, what questions they ask. The “People also ask” box and the related searches at the bottom of the results page are worth a look too.

Competitors’ websites

Search for your main keywords and see what pages the top 10 sites have. Which services get their own pages, what they write about in their blogs. The point isn’t to copy them but to spot topics you missed. For this site, we went through the top 10 results for our ten main searches by hand.

Google Search Console, if your site is already live

The Performance report in Search Console shows the searches your site already appears for, at what average position and how many clicks it got. These are the most valuable keywords. Google already considers you a relevant answer, and often improving the page is enough to move up.

How to do keyword research for a website

There are five steps. The first two give you raw material; the other three turn it into a working document.

Step 1. Write down your seed keywords

Start with what you sell, in your customers’ words rather than your price list’s: “website development”, “website redesign”, “Google Ads setup”. Add synonyms and everyday names. For this site, the seed list included every service in the menu plus “website for…” for each industry we work with.

Step 2. Expand the list

Run each seed keyword through Keyword Planner and autocomplete. One phrase turns into hundreds: with modifiers, questions, cities. At this step you don’t throw anything away; you only collect.

Step 3. Check search volume: the phrase, not the whole topic

Keyword Planner shows the average monthly searches for each phrase and its close variants, and lists the longer versions separately: “free website design”, “website design course” and so on. It’s tempting to add it all up into one big number for the topic. Don’t: most of that tail will never bring you a client.

What matters is how many people search for the phrase itself. Depending on how much your account spends on ads, Keyword Planner may show ranges, such as 1K–10K, instead of exact numbers. That’s still enough to compare phrases and decide what deserves its own page.

The gap can be huge. In the data for this site, the topic total for “website creation” was 111,614 searches a month, while the exact phrase got 1,130. Everything else was tails like “free website creation” and “website creation courses”. Those won’t bring a studio any clients.

Step 4. Clean out junk and build negative keywords

Next, remove everything that won’t bring you a customer:

• “free”, “yourself”, “DIY”, “website builder”: the person wants to do it on their own;
• “courses”, “training”, “jobs”: they’re looking for education or work;
• other companies’ brand names: the person is looking for a specific company;
• navigational searches like “account” and “login”: the person is heading to a specific site.

The words you throw out don’t go to waste. They become your negative keyword list for Google Ads: your ads won’t show to people searching for “free” or “courses”, and your budget won’t leak away.

This is also where you merge duplicates. “Website design cost” and “cost of website design” are the same demand. If you keep both rows, you count it twice.

Step 5. Sort searches by intent

Intent is what the person wants. Commercial searches come from people ready to buy or hire: “website development”, “google ads management”, anything with “cost”, “price” or “hire”. Informational searches come from people who want to understand something: “what is”, “how to”, “explained”. Some are mixed: people search for “website redesign” both to find a contractor and to learn what it means.

The easiest way to check intent is to look at the results. If the top 10 is service pages with prices, the search is commercial. If it’s articles, it’s informational. Commercial searches go to service pages; informational ones go to the blog.

Clustering: one cluster, one page

A cluster is a group of searches answered by one page. “Website development” and “website creation” sound different, but the person wants the same thing. So both lead to one page, Website Development.

You can tell that searches belong to one cluster by their meaning and by the results. If Google shows mostly the same pages for two searches, it treats them as one question. You should answer them with one page too.

Hence the rule: one cluster, one page, and every page has its own cluster. Break it, and you get cannibalization.

What keyword cannibalization is

It’s when two pages on the same site compete for the same search. Google can’t decide which one to show, so it alternates between them. Rankings jump around, and both pages rank lower than one strong page would. The fix: keep one page and merge the other into it, or rework it for a different search.

Example: the keyword map for this site

We built the map for the site you’re reading on September 29, 2026, from search volume data and search suggestions for Russian-language queries. Here’s what came out of it:

• after cleanup, about 16,000 searches remained;
• duplicates were merged, and the junk went into negative keywords: “free”, “yourself”, “website builder”, “courses”, “jobs”, other brands;
• searches with city names (about 1,700 of them) were set aside: we work remotely with clients anywhere, so we don’t need a page for every city;
• the clusters spread across roughly 32 pages: the homepage, services, industries, pricing and blog articles.

A few searches from the map, translated from Russian, and the pages they lead to:

Search	Monthly searches, exact phrase	Page
website SEO promotion	1,684	SEO
website development	1,546	Website development
website creation	1,130	Website development
website redesign	60	Website redesign

The most useful part of the map is the decisions it leads to. Here are four of them.

1. A page about moving a site off Tilda isn’t needed. Tilda is a website builder that’s popular in Russia. Demand was close to zero and informational: people ask how to move their Tilda site to hosting, not who can do it for them. The topic went into the article on how to build a website for your business.
2. A separate “website development and promotion” page isn’t needed. That search has the same intent as the homepage. A second page with the same meaning would steal rankings from the homepage. That’s cannibalization.
3. Pages for narrow niches aren’t needed. “Website for a movie theater” and similar phrases get 0–3 searches a month. Projects like that are shown in our Work section, not on separate pages nobody would find.
4. A “how much does a website cost” article isn’t needed. Its searches return the same results as the pricing page’s searches, so the two pages would split rankings. That topic lives on the pricing page.

Low volume isn’t a death sentence, though. “Website redesign” gets only 60 searches a month, but the top results are small studios, not industry giants. A page like that is easier to win than “website development”.

How a keyword map becomes a site structure and Google Ads campaigns

Once the clusters are ready, the site structure nearly writes itself. Each cluster gets a page, and each page gets a URL, an H1, a title tag and meta description for the search results, a main keyword and a list of secondary ones. Commercial clusters become service pages; informational ones become blog articles. The map also suggests the links between them: an article answers a question and points to where you can order the service.

Your Google Ads campaigns come from the same file. For this site, we prepared a separate list for ads right away: only commercial and mixed searches with at least three exact-phrase searches a month, grouped by the pages the ads will lead to. Informational searches didn’t make the cut: someone searching for “what is a landing page” isn’t buying anything yet. The negative keywords from cleanup go into the campaign from day one. How to turn this into ads, we covered in How to set up Google Ads.

How often to update your keyword map

Keyword research isn’t a one-time job. Demand changes: new terms appear, many topics are seasonal, and you add new services.

• Every few months, check the map against Search Console: it shows new searches your site already appears for.
• Added a service or moved into a new region? Research keywords for it and give it its own page.
• If demand is seasonal, look at the monthly trends in Keyword Planner and get pages ready ahead of the peak.
• Before launching ads or a redesign, refresh the search volumes: numbers from a year ago can be noticeably off.

Building the keyword map is half the job. Then come the pages, the content, the technical fixes and rank tracking. That’s what SEO is made of, and we start every site with keyword research.