Understanding how to choose the right keywords to target is essential if you want to show in traditional and AI search results that actually reach your target audience.
Finding the right terms is easier than you might expect. It just requires the right tools and processes.
In this guide, we’ll explain how to identify, analyze, and select the best keywords for your business.
Step 1. Collect Relevant Keyword Ideas
To collect relevant keyword ideas, analyze competitors’ keywords, review keywords you already rank for, and use keyword and prompt research tools.
Finding Your Competitors’ Keywords
Finding your competitors’ keywords is an easy way to discover new keyword ideas that are likely relevant to your own business.
To find competitors’ terms, enter your domain and competitor domains into Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool and click “Compare.”
Keyword Gap compares keyword profiles of the analyzed domains and lists keyword opportunities.
Scroll down to the “All keyword details for:” section. Select the “Missing” tab to see keywords that competitors rank for but your site doesn’t. And select “Weak” to see keywords where competitors outrank your site.
If your site is new and has no rankings, skip entering your domain. Instead, enter five competitors and focus on the “Shared” tab to see keywords that all entered domains show for in Google’s top 100 results.
If there are keywords all competitors are targeting and showing for, those terms are probably relevant for you, too.
Then, jot down or export a list of any relevant keywords.
Finding Keywords Using a Seed Keyword
Entering a seed keyword (a broad term related to your business) into a keyword research tool uncovers numerous related keyword ideas.
Enter your seed keyword and target location into Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, then click “Search.”
The Keyword Magic Tool returns many related keywords. Use the keyword groups on the left to narrow down to particularly relevant topics. These groups cluster related terms.
For “strength training,” you can see that “strength training program” is a group that contains additional subgroups you can use to find even more specific subtopics.
Repeat this process with various seed keywords. Then, write down or export the keywords you want to add to your list.
Finding Keywords You Already Rank For
Reviewing keywords you appear for that you’re not actively optimizing for reveals opportunities to drive more visibility and possibly more traffic.
Even if your page isn’t prominently showing for a keyword, your content could still be relevant for that search. Improving or expanding this content can lead to better results.
Use Google Search Console (GSC) to find keywords you can get more out of.
Open GSC, then go to the “Search results” report under the “Performance” section to see a graph of your site’s performance over time.
Under the “Queries” tab, you’ll find keywords your site ranks for in Google, including in AI Mode and AI Overviews.
To work with the keyword data from GSC, export the full report by clicking the “Export” button at the top and choose a format (e.g., “Google Sheets”).
Open the file you exported, go to the “Queries” tab/sheet, and sort the keywords by “Position,” which should be the last column.
Make note of the keywords that appear on the second page of Google’s search results (positions 11 to 20).
Finding Prompts Users Type into AI Tools
Identifying prompts your target audience uses in AI tools like ChatGPT can help you understand what content to create to appear in more AI responses.
Identify prompts your audience uses with Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit. Go to Prompt Research, enter a topic, and click “Analyze.”
You’ll see a list of topics that you can click into to see individual prompts related to that topic. You’ll also see an estimate of the number of times people ask about that topic in the “AI Volume” column.
Work through these topics and write down relevant prompts for each one.
Next, go to Competitor Research and enter your domain alongside up to four competitors. Then, click “Run competitor analysis.”
On the next screen, scroll down to the “Topics & Prompts” section. Select the “Prompts” and “Missing” filters to see prompts that any of your competitors appear in AI responses for but you don’t. These prompts represent opportunities to improve your AI visibility.
As you did with Prompt Research, note relevant prompts you want to appear for. You’ll combine these with the other keywords you’ve found in the next step.
Step 2. Group Your Keywords
Grouping keywords allows you to create content that targets terms with the same or similar intent to better cater to your target audience while maximizing the number of relevant queries you can appear for—in both traditional and AI search.
For example, you may have traditionally targeted a single keyword like “strength training exercises,” which has a monthly search volume (MSV) of 8.1K, according to Keyword Overview.
But by grouping similar keywords, you could also include the following keywords and prompts all with the same piece of content:
- “best strength training workouts” (210 MSV)
- “resistance training exercises” (3.6K MSV)
- “strength training exercises with resistance bands” (2.4K MSV)
- “resistance training exercises at home” (1.6K MSV)
- “full body resistance training exercises” (590 MSV)
You’ll want to analyze search engine results pages (SERPs) and AI responses to understand whether you actually should target all of these terms on one page or if you should create multiple pages. Here are two quick questions to ask:
- Are the majority of the SERP listings the same for the keywords? If yes, you can probably target these keywords in the same piece of content. If not, consider creating separate pieces of content for each term.
- Do AI Overviews for those terms cite a lot of the same sources? If yes, it’s a strong indication that Google’s AI considers the terms to have the same intent, and you can probably target them within one piece of content.
While this manual approach is effective, it’s tough to scale. So, use Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder to automatically group your keywords.
Go to Keyword Strategy Builder and select “Create a regular list.”
Enter a list name, then click “Create.”
Next, click the “Add keywords” button at the top right and enter the keywords from all the discovery methods you used. Then click the “Add keywords” button underneath your keyword list.
Next, click “Cluster this list” to automatically group your keywords into pages with similar intent.
You’ll see each topical group, along with:
- The intent for each group
- The average keyword difficulty for each group
- The total monthly search volume for that entire topic
Use intent, difficulty, and search volume to prioritize the groups of keywords. In general, higher search volume and lower keyword difficulty represent the best opportunities.
You also need to make sure the keywords you target are highly relevant to what your business offers to increase the likelihood of success. To better understand whether that’s the case, you need to look closer at the search intent of the keywords you plan to target.
Step 3. Identify Search Intent
Identifying search intent helps you:
- Meet user needs more effectively
- Remove irrelevant keywords
- Choose the right content formats to target keywords
- Assess a keyword’s business value
Search intent is the main goal behind a user’s search query. It explains why someone searches for a term and what they hope to find.
You can think of search intent broadly as aligning to one or more of four different types:
- Navigational intent: The user wants to find a specific page or website (e.g., “amazon kindle login”)
- Informational intent: The user wants to find information (e.g., “what is amazon kindle”)
- Commercial intent: The user wants to do research before converting (e.g., “amazon kindle paperwhite review”)
- Transactional intent: The user wants to complete a transaction (e.g., “buy amazon kindle paperwhite cover”)
You can see a breakdown of the intent of the keyword groups you created with the Keyword Strategy Builder in the previous step:
While it’s useful to understand the broad intent behind keywords, you need to go deeper to fully understand intent and what kind of content you should create.
To analyze the search intent, first go to the search results for one of your target keywords. Look at what types of pages appear and which SERP features show up. This tells you how Google interprets the keyword’s intent.
For example, the top results for “what is the best kindle” are all reviews. This means searchers probably want to see reviews from real people—not product pages. And that indicates commercial intent.
Now that you have a broad sense of intent, the next step is to dive deeper into both the SERP and AI responses for your target terms.
Step 4. Analyze the SERP and AI Responses
Examining a specific keyword’s search results page, including looking at SERP features like AI Overviews and featured snippets, and AI responses helps you better understand a term’s intent and how competitive it is.
Manual SERP Analysis
To conduct a SERP analysis manually, view the Google search results and pay particular attention to features like:
- AI Overviews
- Featured snippets
- People also ask boxes
- Related searches
- Video carousels
For example, for the keyword “best strength training exercises,” the SERP first contains an AI Overview that lists out exercises and provides details on which body parts each exercise works.
The sources to the right of the AI Overview suggest we might want to have a listicle with the best exercises to improve our chances of getting cited in the AI response.
It’s a good idea to go a step further by clicking into the AI Overview sources to see the structure of the articles, the language they use to address reader pain points, and how they use visual elements to make the content more valuable.
For example, in the result below, we can see the page:
- Splits up the individual exercises into subsections of an ordered list
- Includes videos to help readers understand what they need to do for each exercise
- Includes a short description of the exercise
- Adds written steps to make directions easy to follow
Lower on the SERP, there are more listicles and a People Also Ask question asking specifically about the “5 big strength exercises.” This strongly suggests this keyword is informational and suited to listicle content.
There’s also a video carousel on the SERP. This isn’t surprising, as people looking for strength training exercises likely want to see how to do them—not just be told. This means we may want to consider creating video content for this keyword, not just written content.
At the bottom of the SERP, there are related searches around strength training for specific groups (e.g., women and beginners), reasons for working out (e.g., weight loss), and situations (e.g., at home without equipment). These indicate pain points worth covering and also entirely new content ideas.
Analyze AI Responses
Entering a query into an AI tool reveals even more insight into what users are hoping to find and what type of content to create.
When we entered “best strength training exercises” into ChatGPT, we got an in-depth response covering:
- What strength training is
- Exercises for different muscle groups and which specific muscles they target
- An explanation of why the listed exercises matter
- A short list of tips
Looking at the sources, we can see a lot of listicles. This suggests a list format is ideal for both search engine and AI visibility.
Repeat this process for your other keywords to understand what kind of content you should create to improve your visibility everywhere your target audience is searching.
Step 5. Place Keywords Strategically in Your Content
Placing keywords in specific locations helps search engines and AI systems understand what your content is about, which improves your chances of getting high visibility.
First, you need to decide whether you should create new content for the keyword groups you’ve created. For every keyword group you identified, you have two choices:
- Improve existing content that gets little visibility from your target terms to cover the topics more effectively
- Create new content focused on these keywords
Once you’re working on writing a new piece or updating an old one, placing keywords in these key places:
Title Tag
Include your primary keyword (the main one for a given topic) near the beginning of your title tag to make it clear to search engines, AI systems, and users what your page is about.
A title tag is the HTML title that can show in search engine results, browser tabs, and AI answers.
Here’s an example of a title tag showing in the SERP that clearly communicates what the content is about:
Meta Description
Include your primary keyword in your meta description because it can affect your click-through rate (CTR) if it’s displayed in traditional and AI search results.
Here’s an example for the “best strength training exercises” keyword:
“The best strength training exercises to build muscle fast include squats, deadlifts, and bench press.”
Including the main keyword like this tells users this article will meet their intent. And keeping it to around 105 characters reduces the likelihood that it will show in search results without being truncated.
URL
Use your primary keyword as part of a clean, readable URL structure.
A well-structured URL makes it easier for search engines and AI tools to understand your page’s topic.
Here’s an example of a strong URL: “yoursite.com/best-strength-training-exercises.”
H1 Heading and Subheadings
Place your main keyword in your H1 tag (the main heading) and where it makes sense in additional subheadings to reinforce your page’s main topic and organize your content.
For example, if your main keyword is “best strength training exercises,” you might include it and variations of it in your headings like this:
- H1: The 6 Best Strength Training Exercises to Build Muscle
- H2: What Are the Best Strength Training Exercises for Beginners?
- H2: What Equipment Do You Need for Strength Training Exercises?
Body Content
Aim to mention your primary keyword naturally within the first few paragraphs of your content to tell users, search engines, and AI tools what your page covers.
Here’s an example of how we strategically incorporated the primary keyword near the beginning of our article about on-page SEO:
Also use your main keyword and other relevant keywords naturally throughout your content.
Longer content naturally allows for more keyword mentions. But avoid forcing keywords into every paragraph. This is called keyword stuffing, and it makes your content read unnaturally and can harm your search visibility.
Choose the Right Keywords for SEO Success
To choose the right keywords, you need to understand where to find them and how to prioritize them. Manual competitor and search result analyses can help you do this, but the right tools make the entire process much easier and faster.
Get everything you need for identifying relevant prompts and keywords with Semrush One, which combines the SEO Toolkit and AI Visibility Toolkit.
Try Semrush One today.
