Keyword Research for SEO in 2026: Step-by-Step Tutorial
We'll brainstorm ideas, use real search data to find high-demand, low-competition topics, and build a strategy to grow your website traffic by targeting the right search terms. To start, let's open Semrush, an all-in-one SEO tool that helps you find and analyse keywords. Instead of guessing which terms to target, Semrush lets us see real search data, competition levels, and ranking opportunities instantly. If you don't have an account yet, that's okay. You can do everything I'm going to show you today for free.
Normally, Semrush offers a seven-day trial, but if you use the link in the description below, you can get an exclusive, extended 14-day trial. So, go ahead and sign up, then meet me on the Semrush Dashboard. On the Semrush Dashboard, go to the left side nav bar and click on the Keyword Magic Tool. We'll start by brainstorming our seed keywords. Seed keywords are just the broad topics we know our audience cares about. For example, if you blog about healthy recipes, your seeds might be vegan recipes, keto diet,
or quick meal prep. We'll use seeds to find thousands of related terms. Enter a seed keyword relevant to your niche or business. In my case, I'll put chocolate chip cookies because I have a little bit of a sweet tooth today. Click Search. The reason we start with broad terms is so we don't miss hidden gems. Today, AI-generated content and increased competition mean you need to grab any specific angle or sub-niche you can, and that's exactly what this tool helps us find. Semrush now shows us related keyword ideas.
There are search volumes and competitiveness, also called keyword difficulty. I'll explain what each metric means right now and then we'll put it into practise. Search volume tells us roughly how many times people look for that keyword each month. Difficulty, or KD percentage, hints how tough it'll be to rank for that term. This is scored from 0 to 100 with 100 being the hardest and 0 being the easiest. Today, there's a tonne of AI content out there, so picking moderate or low-difficulty keywords
can give you quicker wins. Another critical factor Semrush gives us at a glance is search intent, which simply means what do users actually expect to find when they search this keyword? It could be informational, meaning they want to learn something, transactional, meaning they want to buy something, commercial, meaning they're researching before buying something, or navigational, meaning they want a specific website. Matching your content to the right intent makes it way easier to rank. As we scroll through here,
notice some queries are pretty long like this one here, chocolate chip cookie recipe without brown sugar. This is called a long-tail keyword. Long-tail keywords might have fewer searches, but they're golden because they reflect specific needs and less competition. This is especially helpful with more people using voice search, asking full questions to various AI assistants. At the top, we have a bunch of filters. Let's set a difficulty filter to the easy and very easy range. So under KD, we'll say 0 to 29,
which is the very top of the easy range, and we'll click Apply to see what remains. We'll also make sure to sort by search volume highest to lowest to spot decent traffic opportunities. If you have these three bars with the biggest one at top, that means you're sorting highest to lowest. If you need to update this, simply click on it. Here's lowest to highest. And back to highest to lowest. Now we've narrowed our list down to keywords with decent search volume but lower competition.
This gives us some quick win opportunities with the potential to rank faster. Now that we've filtered our keywords by volume and difficulty, let's move on to step two of our process. We'll analyse them to find the best opportunities and start building a list of keywords to include in an article. We'll pick mini chocolate chip cookies as our example keyword and open it's keyword overview page by clicking on it. Right away, Semrush gives us essential keyword data. For the volume, we see 3,600 monthly searches,
which is pretty solid traffic. We see a difficulty of 21%, which is easy, very achievable with good content. And over here we see that the intent is informational, meaning users are looking for guides, recipes, or how-to content. Scrolling down to the Keyword Overview page, we reach the Keyword Ideas section. This area suggests related keywords, variations, and questions people are searching for, all valuable opportunities to expand your content strategy. Look for long-tail keywords and lower-difficulty terms
that align with your main topic. These can be easier to rank for while still attracting your desired audience. Scrolling down further to the SERP Analysis section, we see exactly what's ranking for mini chocolate chip cookies, a breakdown of the search engine results page, or SERP, that shows what appears when someone searches for this keyword. The number one ranking is a recipe from Cooking Classy. If we click this little arrow icon, we can go to the site, and we see it's clearly informational content,
lots of images, and a step-by-step structure. Other results, like Kroll's Corner and Chel Sweets also provide detailed recipes which confirm exactly the type of content we should create. Also, notice the image pack and featured snippets appearing in the search results. The position zero, or featured snippet at the top of the page, is a collection of three recipes which appear even before the official first result. This tells us that Google prefers structured information, exactly what we'd want to provide
to capture this valuable spot. Another metric to pay attention to is the Page Authority Score or Page AS. This measures a webpages overall strength in search rankings based on backlinks, traffic and keyword rankings. A higher AS means a site is more trusted by Google, making it harder to outrank, but by targeting lower AS competitors, you can find easier keyword opportunities. At the top right of this SERP Analysis section, you can also click View SERP to view the actual search engine results page.
Now that we understand some of the basic analysis tools, let's create a list of keywords for us to target. Back on the overview, under Keyword Ideas and Keyword Variations, click the View All Keywords button. Here, add a filter to just look at informational keywords. Click Apply. Check the boxes next to keywords with decent search that seem relevant to your intended content and leave out any keywords that are clearly associated with a brand that isn't yours, like Pillsbury and Toll House in our list here.
When you're done selecting keywords that seem like a good fit, let's save them to a new list. Click the blue Send Keywords button at the top right. Then, apply it to the Keyword Strategy Builder. Create a name for your new list. In our case, we'll name it mini chocolate chip cookies recipe blog. The check mark indicates we've added these keywords to the list. Click back in your browser, then click back again to return to the Keyword Overview page. Then under Keyword Ideas and Questions,
click View All Keywords. Follow the same process, adding an intent filter and checking boxes of relevant keywords. Click Send Keywords, then click on the name of the list you just created. To view your list of keywords, click on the arrow icon next to the list name. This will take you to the Keyword Strategy Builder. Click on the volume column header to sort by high to low search volume. At the top of the page, you can see the total number of keywords, the total monthly search volume across all the keywords,
and the average keyword difficulty of all the keywords in your list. Now that we've identified great keyword opportunities, let's move on to step three and see what our competitors are ranking for that we aren't. This is one of the best ways to uncover hidden content opportunities and bridge ranking gaps. We'll use Semrush's Keyword Gap tool to find untapped keywords that have search traffic but aren't being leveraged on our site yet. Navigate to Semrush's Keyword Gap tool on the left nav bar.
Then, enter your domain. For our demonstration, let's say our website is diethood.com, a food blog. Then, add three to four competitor domains. In this case, we'll use the top three sites from the SERP Analysis page for mini chocolate chip cookies. Copying them over, we have cookingclassy.com, krollscorner.com, and chelsweets.com. These sites target similar audiences to our primary domain, so analysing their keyword strengths will help us identify what's missing from our own content.
Click Compare to generate the Keyword Overlap report. Once the report loads, scroll down and check out the top opportunities. Missing keywords are high-volume keywords your competitors rank for, but you don't. This is ideal for creating new content. Weak keywords are keywords where your site ranks lower than your competitors, signalling an opportunity for optimization or content improvement. Looking at this report, we see some of the high-potential keywords Diet Hood is missing. Click on View Details
or scroll down and click Missing to see all of the missing keywords. The numbers in each of these columns represent the position in the Google search results where these sites show up for these various keywords. So, since Diet Hood isn't showing up at all, it's represented by a 0. Cooking Classy shows up as number 58 in the Google search results for crinkle cookies, Kroll's Corner at 35 and Chel Sweets at 73. Click on any keyword in the Missing category to view its search intent, volume, and keyword difficulty.
For example, brown butter cookies has 9,900 searches per month and moderate difficulty. It's informational, meaning a recipe post would probably be the best way to target it. Let's go back to the previous page. To boost our mini chocolate chip cookies recipe, let's find relevant missing keywords we can add to the article. For example, I like mini cookies. Scrolling through, I also see miniature cookies, mini cookie, small cookies, mini cookies chips, and small cookie recipe. Notice a lot of these keywords I'm adding
are just variations on the mini or small cookie theme that we didn't find with the Keyword Ideas previously. Click on the plus icon next to relevant keywords to add them to the list, or click on the checkbox, then scroll up back to the top and click the Add to Keyword List, selecting the mini chocolate chip cookies recipe blog. Next, let's get some quick wins. Let's look for keywords where you rank between 11 and 30, which is page two of Google's search results. Wait, hold on. Page two?
Did you know there was a second page of Google? Page two gets hardly any traffic, so let's push these up to page one where all the attention is. These weak-ranking keywords on page two are low-hanging fruit. Since we're already ranking close to page one, we can tweak or expand our existing content to push them higher. To find these keywords, go to Weak, then at the top under Filters, click Position, You-domain, and custom range from 11 to 30. Then, click Apply. Scrolling down, we can see all of these keywords
and where they rank compared to the competitors. These weak-ranking keywords on page two are low-hanging fruit. Since we're already ranking close to page one, we can tweak or expand our existing content to push them higher. For an example, little chocolate chip cookies is ranked number 22. In this example, since our primary domain, diethood.com, already has a mini chocolate chip cookie recipe, the best move for this website is to update that post to better target this keyword. Let's add it to our list.
We'll also add some of these other keywords. As you build your keyword list, prioritise missing keywords when you're planning new content and prioritise weak keywords when you're optimising existing content. By filling these gaps and improving underperforming pages, we can create a data-driven content strategy that aligns with a real search demand. Now that we have a list of keywords we'd like to target, let's organise them further and prepare to create some content. Let's navigate to Keyword Strategy Builder on the left side,
then scroll down and click on our mini chocolate chip cookies list. Here in Keyword Strategy Builder, we have our full list of keywords. Here, we have 80 keywords with a total search volume of 17,700, and an average keyword difficulty of 14.05%. This is great. If we click Volume, we can sort high or low. If keywords all revolve around the same topic, we can cluster them into one detailed article. Select all the related keywords in your list, in our case, all of them, then at the top right, click Cluster this List.
Semrush will take a few minutes to process. Clustering keywords just means grouping similar topics together so our content is more organised and easier to rank. When it finishes processing, you can see how it sorted everything. Here, you can see it sorted it into four categories, small cookies, mini chocolate chip cookies calories, mini batch chocolate chip cookies, and you can see this first page here has 72 keywords. So if we click to expand it, you can see the keywords sorted by difficulty with the highest difficulty up top,
or you can click Volume to sort by the highest volume. Now that you have a clustered list of keywords, here's how you can turn this research into a blog post about mini chocolate chip cookies. Next to our small cookies group here, let's go to the right and click Create Brief or Content. Then, let's create a brief in ContentShake. Click Apply. It'll load a bunch of competitor articles. Go through and select the ones that are the most relevant. Then, click Continue. It'll come up with a suggested title
and length for an article. I'm gonna click Show Suggestions and see what it comes up with. I'm actually going to change it to easy mini chocolate chip cookies recipe. Then, I'll click Continue. Next, it'll propose a bunch of secondary keywords. These are all pulled in from our list. We can also go in and add some additional suggested keywords. That looks good to me. I'll go ahead and click Continue. You can scroll through to look at the proposed structure and make any changes that you want.
At the bottom you can click Show Suggestions and it'll have some AI suggestions as well as used by competitors. For our demo, I'm just going to use the proposed one. Click Continue. It'll come up with some meta info. For example, a description. Here, it suggests an optimal length of 50 to 160 characters. I like what this came up with, so I'll click Finish. Now we have an SEO content brief, which we can click Share at the top right and share read-only access to send to our creative team,
or we can use this as a template in Google Docs to write our article. Alternatively, you can click Generate SEO Article and have ContentShake inside of Semrush create an article for you. Today, let's try this method. Semrush will spend a few minutes thinking about your article based on your brief. When ContentShake finishes processing, you'll get to see the article that it created. Scroll through and check it out. It's usually a pretty good starting point and has a lot of information,
but I do recommend going through and customising it. When you're ready to export the article, click Publish. From here, you can publish directly to a WordPress site if you add one or you can send it to a Google Doc and from there you can edit it more. When it sends to Google Docs, click Open Document, and then it'll open right up and you have an editable document right there. A few tweaks I recommend making. Right at the start of your article, summarise key points clearly, maybe a bullet point list
with ingredients and quick prep instructions. Use concise structured formatting like lists or tables, and aim for a 40 to 60 word summary, as Google often pulls featured snippets from well-organized, direct answers. Including an FAQ section with common questions related to the content can further improve snippet eligibility. You can use Semrush's suggested keyword questions as a starting point. I also recommend including clear, appealing images of the content. In our case, I would add pictures of cookies.
The current top-ranked sites all use visuals prominently. With AI content everywhere, the best way to stand out is by sharing firsthand experience. Demonstrating real expertise signals authority, making your content more valuable to both human audiences and search engines. Google prioritises trustworthy, original insights, so give it a personal touch, something that AI can't replicate. If you found this helpful, I'd love it if you hit Like or left a quick comment about your favourite tip.
If you haven't already, make sure to grab your exclusive 14-day free trial of Semrush using the link in the description. This will give you full access to everything we covered today, so you can start applying these strategies right away.