How to do keyword research and analysis

Keyword research means finding the words your customers use when they look online for what you offer. Keyword analysis is the next part: you weigh up each keyword and pick the ones worth a page. Take your hair salon at shearbloomsalon.co.uk. "Haircut" is too broad for it to rank for, but "wedding hair trial" could bring you exactly the bookings you want.

Doing keyword research and analysis comes down to three jobs. You list what your customers search for, check each keyword's search volume, difficulty and intent, and give the best ones a page each. The step-by-step list further down takes your salon through it.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research shows you the exact words people type when they look for products, services or information online. When your pages use the same words, the people looking for what you offer can find your website. It's one of the foundations of SEO, because a page written in words nobody searches with is hard to find.

It also tells you what customers want. If people near you often search for "curly hair specialist", that's a service you could offer more clearly, or a page you could write.

Keyword analysis then narrows the long list that research gives you down to the few keywords your salon has a real chance with.

Types of keywords

The keywords on your list fall into five types, and each brings a different kind of visitor:

• Short-tail keywords are short, general searches, such as "hairdresser". Many people search for them, and many businesses compete for them.
• Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific, such as "wedding hair trial". A niche keyword like "curly hair specialist" is a long-tail keyword too.
• Question keywords are searches written as a question, such as "how often should I cut my hair". A page or section that answers them clearly can bring in people who aren't ready to book yet.
• Local keywords include a place, such as "hairdresser Bristol". They matter for any business with customers nearby, and they're where local SEO starts.
• Brand keywords include your business name. People search for it once they know you, so make sure your own website is what they find.

Long-tail keywords get fewer searches, but Semrush finds that people who search this precisely often know exactly what they're looking for. Someone who searches "wedding hair trial" is probably already planning to book one.

How to analyse keywords

To do keyword analysis, you check three things for each keyword: its search volume, its difficulty and the intent behind it. A keyword tool gives you figures for volume and difficulty, and some tools also label the intent, but to see what the searcher wants you look at the search results yourself.

Search volume

Start by checking how many people search for a keyword. That figure is its search volume, shown as searches per month. Google Keyword Planner, for example, gives estimates of these monthly searches. Treat the number as a rough guide rather than an exact count.

A good search volume depends on your business. A national retailer sells to the whole country and may need keywords with a high search volume. Your salon only needs the people nearby, so don't rule out keywords that far fewer people use, as long as those people are the ones who book.

Keyword difficulty

Next, check how hard it would be to reach the first page. SEO tools give each keyword a difficulty score for this. In Semrush, for example, it runs from 0 to 100, and the higher the score, the harder it's likely to be. Each tool works the score out in its own way. Ahrefs, for one, bases it only on the backlinks to the top-ranking pages, counting how many different websites they come from. So compare scores within one tool rather than across tools.

You can also judge difficulty without a tool. Search for the keyword and look at the first page. If it's full of national chains and big directories, a small salon will struggle there. If you see other small businesses, or short pages that barely answer the search, you have a chance.

Search intent

Then work out what the searcher wants. Search intent is the reason someone chooses to search for something online. Semrush calls understanding it critical if you want your content to rank. There are four main types of search intent, each looking for its own kind of page:

• Informational: the searcher wants to learn about something, such as "how to look after coloured hair".
• Navigational: the searcher wants to find a specific page or website, such as a salon chain's name typed to reach its booking page.
• Commercial: the searcher is researching options before a purchase, such as "best salons for balayage".
• Transactional: the searcher wants to take an action, such as "book a haircut today".

The pages that rank show you the intent behind a keyword. If the first page is full of guides, write a guide for that keyword rather than a booking page. If it shows booking and service pages, write a service page.

Which keywords should you target first?

Our advice: start with long-tail keywords, especially while your website is new or small. Fewer businesses compete for them than for broad keywords like "hairdresser". Choose ones whose intent matches a page you have or will write. Go more specific when the pages that rank belong to businesses much bigger than yours. Once your pages rank for a few long-tail keywords, try the broader ones.

Keyword research tools

You can start keyword research without paying for a tool. These are good places to start, with the paid tools last:

• Google's own suggestions: type a keyword such as "wedding hair" into Google and note the searches it suggests as you type. These predictions reflect real searches people have done on Google.
• Google Search Console is a free service from Google. Once you've added your live website and verified that it's yours, it shows which search queries bring visitors to your site, which are the keywords you already appear for.
• Google Keyword Planner is Google's tool for advertisers. It suggests keywords related to your business and estimates how often each is searched every month.
• AnswerThePublic shows the real questions people ask about a topic, which makes it a quick source of question keywords.
• Ahrefs and Semrush are paid tools that give each keyword you look up a search volume and a difficulty score. It's worth paying for one once you work on SEO regularly.

Can I use AI for keyword research?

Yes, for ideas. Tell an AI chat tool about your business, your customers and what you want to achieve, then ask it to brainstorm topics and keywords. Treat its suggestions as a starting point, not as figures you can rely on. Before you build a page around a keyword it suggests, check its search volume and difficulty in a keyword tool.

How to do keyword research step by step

If you have a website or are about to build one and want the words your customers search with, follow these steps. They take your hair salon from an empty spreadsheet to a keyword for each page.

1. If your website is already live, start in Google Search Console. Once you've added your site and verified that it's yours, note the searches it appears for today.
2. Write down what your salon offers, what makes it different and who your target audience is.
3. List the words and questions your customers might search with, in a spreadsheet.
4. Grow the list with the searches Google suggests as you type, the related searches and a keyword tool, and add the long-tail variants you find.
5. Search each keyword and look at the pages that rank: who you're up against, and what kind of page the searcher wants.
6. Choose the keywords you'll go for, following the advice on which keywords to target first.
7. Give each chosen keyword its own page, but put keywords that mean the same thing together on one page, so every page on your website has one main keyword.

For your salon, step 2 might give topics such as haircuts, hair colour and wedding hair. Step 4 turns "wedding hair" into long-tail keywords such as "wedding hair trial" and local ones such as "wedding hair Bristol". Step 5 then shows you whether local salons or national wedding sites rank for them. If local salons rank, you might pick "wedding hair trial" in step 6 and give it its own page on shearbloomsalon.co.uk in step 7.

The websites you find in step 5 are your competitors in search, even if they're nowhere near your high street. Competitive keyword research means looking at them more closely. A paid tool such as Ahrefs can show the keywords a competitor's website gets its traffic from. A full competitor analysis also compares their services, prices and reviews with yours.

How to use keywords on your website

Once each page has its main keyword, use the related words and questions on the same page too. Your wedding hair trial page, for example, can have "wedding hair trial" as its main keyword and answer questions such as "how long before the wedding should I have a hair trial" further down. Once it ranks, you can go for a broader keyword such as "wedding hair". Don't let two pages share a main keyword. If you only need one of the pages that do, merge them with a permanent (301) redirect from the removed page to the one you keep. If you need to keep both, give one of them a different keyword.

Use the main keyword in these places:

• Your title tag and meta description, the title and short text Google can show in the search results. Write both for the person searching.
• The main heading at the top of the page, which tells visitors straight away what the page is about.
• Your subheadings and text, with the long-tail versions and questions wherever they fit naturally.

If your website runs on WordPress, the Rank Math plugin gives you clear SEO suggestions as you write.

Write for people first. Repeating the same keyword over and over makes a text tiring to read, and Google's spam policies count keyword stuffing as spam. A good test is to read your text aloud. If the keyword sounds forced, use another word or rephrase the sentence. Clear headings and short paragraphs are part of good SEO copywriting too, as they make the page easier to scan.

Track and revisit your keywords

Once your salon's pages are live, look in Google Search Console for the searches that bring visitors to them. You'll often find searches you didn't plan for, and they can become new sections or new pages. Results take time to show, and how long SEO takes differs from one website to the next.

Revisit your keyword research now and then too, for example when your salon adds a service. The words your customers use change, and so does the competition. You can do all of this yourself, a few pages at a time, or get help from our SEO experts.

Our SEO team refines the texts, headings and images on your website, so search engines understand your business better.