Beginner SEO Guide: How to Do Keyword Research in 2020

Keyword Research: Why Everything in SEO Starts Here

I have run an SEO agency in Chicago for over a decade now. I have worked with personal injury lawyers, roofing contractors, dental practices, HVAC companies, and dozens of other local businesses. And if there is one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty, it is this: every successful SEO campaign I have ever run started with keyword research. Not with a fancy website redesign. Not with a blog calendar. Not with link building. It started with understanding exactly what potential customers are typing into Google when they need what you sell.

Keyword research is not some technical exercise you do once and forget about. It is the foundation that every other piece of your SEO strategy is built on. Get it wrong, and you will spend months creating content nobody searches for, optimizing pages for terms you will never rank for, and wondering why your phone is not ringing. Get it right, and everything else — your content, your on-page optimization, your local strategy — clicks into place.

This is the complete guide I wish someone had handed me when I started. No fluff, no theory for theory's sake. Just the methodology I actually use with clients, updated for how search works in 2026.

What Keyword Research Actually Is (and What It Is Not)

At its core, keyword research is the process of discovering the words and phrases people use when searching for products, services, information, or solutions related to your business. It involves identifying those terms, analyzing how often they are searched, understanding how competitive they are, and — most critically — figuring out what the person searching actually wants.

What keyword research is not: pulling a list of high-volume terms from a tool and stuffing them into your pages. That approach died years ago, and if anyone is still pitching you on it, walk away.

Modern keyword research is really audience research. You are not just finding words. You are mapping the questions, problems, comparisons, and decisions your potential customers go through before they pick up the phone or fill out a form. When I work with a personal injury attorney in Chicago, I am not just looking for “car accident lawyer.” I am mapping out every stage of that injured person's journey — from “what to do after a car accident” all the way down to “best car accident lawyer near me free consultation.” Each of those queries represents a different moment, a different need, and a different piece of content.

Search Intent: The Single Most Important Concept in Keyword Research

If you take one thing away from this entire guide, let it be this: search intent matters more than search volume. I cannot overstate this. I have seen businesses chase 10,000-volume keywords and get zero leads, and I have seen them rank for 50-volume keywords that generate five figures a month in new business.

Every search query falls into one of four intent categories:

Informational Intent

The searcher wants to learn something. They are not ready to buy — they are researching, educating themselves, or trying to solve a problem. Examples: “how does SEO work,” “signs you need a new roof,” “what to do after a dog bite.” These queries are your top-of-funnel opportunity. They build trust and authority. They are how people find you before they even know they need you.

Navigational Intent

The searcher is looking for a specific website, brand, or page. “Kevin Mahoney SEO Chicago,” “Yelp plumber reviews,” “Google Search Console login.” These are important for brand visibility, but you typically do not target them unless they involve your own brand.

Commercial Investigation Intent

The searcher is comparing options and getting close to a decision. “Best personal injury lawyer Chicago,” “SEMrush vs Ahrefs,” “top-rated dental implant dentist near me.” This is where the money starts. These people are actively evaluating providers. If you are not showing up for these queries, your competitors are capturing your potential clients.

Transactional Intent

The searcher is ready to act. “Hire SEO agency Chicago,” “emergency plumber 60614,” “book dental cleaning online.” These have the highest conversion rates. They are also the most competitive. And here is what most businesses get wrong — they only target transactional keywords and ignore everything else. That is like trying to close a sale without ever introducing yourself.

Here is a real example from my agency. A roofing contractor client was obsessed with ranking for “roofing company Chicago.” That is a fine keyword, but it is brutally competitive and the intent is mixed. When we mapped out the full intent spectrum, we found that “how to tell if your roof has hail damage” had decent volume, almost no competition, and the people searching it were homeowners who needed a roofer right now — they just did not know it yet. We built a detailed guide targeting that query, added a clear call to action, and it became one of their top lead generators within three months.

The lesson: match your content to the intent behind the keyword, not just the keyword itself. This principle should guide every on-page SEO decision you make.

Long-Tail Keywords: Where Small Businesses Win

Head keywords are short, broad, high-volume terms: “lawyer,” “dentist,” “roofing.” They are also absurdly competitive, vague in intent, and nearly impossible for a small or mid-sized business to rank for. You are not going to outrank the legal directories, national chains, and Wikipedia pages that dominate those results.

Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases: “personal injury lawyer for truck accidents in Lincoln Park,” “pediatric dentist who takes Medicaid in Naperville,” “flat roof repair cost for commercial building.” They get searched less often individually, but they convert at dramatically higher rates because the intent is crystal clear. And collectively, long-tail queries make up the vast majority of all searches — somewhere around 70 percent by most estimates.

For the small businesses I work with, long-tail keywords are where the real ROI lives. Here is why:

Lower competition. Fewer businesses are specifically optimizing for them, so you can rank faster with less authority.
Higher conversion rates. Someone searching “affordable family dentist accepting new patients in Schaumburg” is further along in their decision than someone searching “dentist.”
Clearer content direction. You know exactly what to write about when the query is specific. There is no guessing at intent.
They compound. Fifty long-tail pages each getting 20 visits a month equals 1,000 highly targeted visitors. That often outperforms a single head term page getting 1,000 visits of mixed intent.

My approach with every small business SEO engagement is to find the long-tail opportunities first, build a content plan around them, and let the head term rankings develop naturally over time as the site builds authority. It is not glamorous, but it works.

The Tools You Actually Need

You do not need every keyword tool on the market. You need a few good ones and the discipline to use them systematically. Here is what I use in my agency and what I recommend to clients who want to handle some of this in-house.

Google Search Console (Free — Start Here)

This is the most underused keyword research tool in existence, and it is free. Search Console shows you the actual queries people are using to find your site right now — impressions, clicks, average position, click-through rate. This is not estimated data from a third-party tool. This is real data from Google itself. I start every keyword research project here because it reveals opportunities you are already close to capturing. If you are showing up on page two for a valuable query, that is a content optimization opportunity, not a new page build.

Google Keyword Planner (Free with a Google Ads Account)

Keyword Planner is Google's own tool for discovering keyword ideas and getting volume estimates. The volume ranges are broad unless you are running ads, but it is excellent for discovering related terms you had not considered and understanding seasonal trends. I use it heavily for local keyword discovery — plug in a service plus a location and it generates useful variations quickly.

SEMrush

This is the primary tool in my agency for competitive keyword research. SEMrush lets you see exactly what keywords your competitors rank for, how much traffic those keywords drive, what content is performing, and where the gaps are. The Keyword Gap tool alone is worth the subscription — it shows you keywords your competitors rank for that you do not. That is your roadmap for what to build next.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is exceptional for understanding keyword difficulty and backlink requirements. When I want to know how hard it will be to rank for a specific term and what kind of content and links the top-ranking pages have, Ahrefs gives me the clearest picture. Its Content Explorer tool is also excellent for finding content ideas that have proven traction.

Answer the Public and AlsoAsked

Both of these tools visualize the questions people ask around a topic. They are particularly useful for mapping informational intent queries and building out topic clusters. I use them early in the research process to understand the full scope of questions in a niche.

How to Do Keyword Research: The Step-by-Step Process I Actually Use

Here is the methodology I follow with every client. It is not the only way, but it is battle-tested across hundreds of engagements.

Step 1: Define Your Core Topics

Start with your business. What services do you offer? What problems do you solve? What do your customers call what you do? Write down 5 to 10 core topics. For a personal injury firm: car accidents, slip and fall, medical malpractice, workers' compensation, wrongful death. For a dental practice: teeth whitening, dental implants, emergency dentistry, pediatric dentistry, cosmetic dentistry. These are your seed topics — the starting point for everything that follows.

Step 2: Expand with Seed Keywords

Take each core topic and generate seed keywords. Use Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and autocomplete to find variations. For “dental implants,” you might discover: dental implant cost, dental implant procedure, dental implant recovery time, all-on-4 dental implants, dental implants vs dentures, dental implant pain, dental implant specialist near me. Do this for every core topic. You should end up with 50 to 200 seed keywords depending on your niche.

Step 3: Analyze Search Volume and Difficulty

Run your seed keywords through SEMrush or Ahrefs to get volume estimates and difficulty scores. But do not fall into the trap of only chasing high volume. I filter for what I call the “sweet spot” — keywords with enough volume to matter (usually 100 or more monthly searches for local businesses, 500 or more for national), difficulty scores your site can realistically compete on, and clear commercial or informational intent.

Step 4: Classify by Intent

Go through your filtered list and tag each keyword with its intent: informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional. This step determines what kind of content you build. Informational keywords become blog posts and guides. Commercial keywords become comparison pages and service pages. Transactional keywords become landing pages with strong calls to action. Skip this step and you will build the wrong content for the keyword.

Step 5: Competitive Analysis

For your top priority keywords, search them in Google and study the top 5 results. What kind of content ranks? How long is it? What subtopics does it cover? What is missing? This tells you what Google considers the right answer for that query and — more importantly — where you can create something better. If the top results are thin 500-word pages, you have an opportunity. If they are 3,000-word comprehensive guides from authoritative sites, you need a different angle.

Step 6: Map Keywords to Pages

Assign each keyword (or keyword group) to a specific page on your site — either existing or planned. One primary keyword per page, with 3 to 5 supporting keywords that share the same intent. Never target the same primary keyword with two different pages. That creates internal competition and confuses Google about which page to rank. This is the bridge between research and execution, and it feeds directly into your content marketing strategy.

Keyword Clustering and Topic Mapping

Individual keywords are useful. Keyword clusters are powerful. A keyword cluster is a group of related keywords that share the same core topic and can be addressed through a connected set of content pieces.

Here is how I build topic maps for clients. Take a core topic like “dental implants.” The cluster might include:

Pillar page: “The Complete Guide to Dental Implants” (targets the head term, links to all cluster content)
Supporting pages: “Dental Implant Cost: What to Expect in 2026,” “Dental Implants vs Dentures: Which Is Right for You,” “Dental Implant Recovery: Timeline and Tips,” “All-on-4 Dental Implants Explained,” “Am I a Candidate for Dental Implants?”
FAQ content: “Do Dental Implants Hurt?,” “How Long Do Dental Implants Last?,” “Does Insurance Cover Dental Implants?”

Each piece targets a distinct keyword group with distinct intent, but they all link to each other and back to the pillar page. This creates a topical cluster that signals to Google: this site is an authority on dental implants. It is not just one page — it is comprehensive coverage of the entire topic.

Topic mapping also prevents cannibalization. When you map everything out before you write, you ensure no two pages compete for the same keyword. I have audited sites that had three or four blog posts all targeting the same term, and none of them ranked because Google could not figure out which one to show. Clustering prevents that entirely.

Local Keyword Research: Patterns That Drive Phone Calls

For the local businesses I work with — and that is the majority of my client base — local keyword research has its own set of patterns and strategies. Local search behavior is different from national search, and your keyword research needs to reflect that.

The Core Local Keyword Patterns

Most local searches follow predictable patterns. Understanding them lets you build a systematic local keyword strategy:

[Service] + [City]: “personal injury lawyer Chicago,” “emergency plumber Naperville”
[Service] + near me: “dentist near me,” “roofer near me” — these have exploded and now carry strong local pack intent
[Service] + [Neighborhood]: “divorce attorney Lincoln Park,” “HVAC repair Wicker Park” — less volume but hyper-targeted
[Service] + [Qualifier]: “affordable divorce lawyer Chicago,” “24 hour emergency vet near me,” “Spanish-speaking dentist Oak Park”
[Problem] + [Location]: “leaking roof repair Evanston,” “car accident what to do Illinois”
Implicit local intent: Some queries are local without a location modifier — “plumber,” “divorce lawyer,” “pizza delivery.” Google serves local results because the intent is inherently local. You still need to optimize for these.

Building a Local Keyword Matrix

I create a matrix for every local client: services on one axis, locations on the other. For a personal injury firm serving the Chicago metro area, that might be 8 practice areas across 15 suburbs and neighborhoods. That is 120 keyword combinations, each potentially worth a dedicated landing page or content piece. Not every combination will have volume, but the ones that do become your local content roadmap.

The key is researching which combinations people actually search. “Personal injury lawyer Schaumburg” might get 50 searches a month. “Personal injury lawyer Barrington” might get 5. Both are worth knowing about, but they get different levels of investment.

AI Search and What It Means for Keyword Strategy in 2026

I am not going to pretend AI has not changed search. It has. Google's AI Overviews now appear for a significant percentage of queries, and tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are becoming legitimate alternative search channels. This has real implications for keyword research.

What Has Changed

AI Overviews absorb a lot of clicks for simple informational queries. “What is keyword research” gets answered right in the search results now — the click-through rate on those basic definitions has dropped. Some informational keywords that used to drive solid traffic now drive less because the answer is shown without requiring a click.

What Has Not Changed

Complex queries, local searches, transactional searches, and queries requiring nuance or personal experience — these still drive clicks. “Best personal injury lawyer for truck accidents in Chicago” is not something an AI Overview can adequately answer. Neither is “should I get dental implants or a bridge” — that requires personalized evaluation. These queries are more valuable than ever because competition for clicks on simple queries has made the complex, high-intent queries relatively more important.

How to Adapt Your Keyword Strategy

Prioritize keywords where AI Overviews do not appear. Check manually or use SEMrush's SERP feature filters. If a keyword consistently triggers an AI Overview that fully answers the query, it is lower priority for organic content.
Target experiential and subjective queries. AI can summarize facts, but it cannot tell you what it is like to work with a specific lawyer or how a particular contractor handled a job. First-hand experience content is AI-resistant.
Double down on local and transactional intent. These are the hardest for AI to absorb because they require real-world verification and action.
Build content that gets cited by AI. When AI Overviews do appear, they pull from authoritative sources. Being comprehensive, well-structured, and authoritative gives you a chance of being that source — which still drives brand visibility even without a direct click.
Optimize for conversational long-tail queries. People using AI search and voice search tend to ask full questions: “What should I look for when hiring an SEO agency in Chicago?” Target those natural language patterns.

Common Keyword Research Mistakes I See Constantly

After years of auditing SEO campaigns that other agencies or DIY efforts started, I see the same mistakes over and over. Avoid these and you are already ahead of most of your competitors.

Chasing Volume Over Intent

The highest-volume keyword is rarely the best keyword for your business. A contractor ranking number one for “home improvement” (millions of searches, completely generic intent) will generate far fewer leads than one ranking for “kitchen remodel contractor Hinsdale” (50 searches, but every single one is a potential client). Always ask: if someone searches this and lands on my page, are they likely to become a customer? If the answer is no, move on.

Ignoring What You Already Rank For

I mentioned this earlier, but it is worth repeating. Google Search Console shows you keywords where you already appear in search results. If you are in positions 8 through 20 for a valuable keyword, you are closer to page-one visibility than you think. Optimizing existing content is almost always faster and cheaper than creating new content from scratch.

Keyword Cannibalization

This happens when multiple pages on your site target the same keyword. Google does not know which one to rank, so it either picks the wrong one or suppresses both. I see this constantly with business blogs — three posts about “how to choose a divorce lawyer” all competing with each other. Map your keywords to pages. One primary keyword per page. No exceptions.

Forgetting About Seasonal Trends

Some keywords spike at certain times of year. “HVAC repair” surges in summer and winter. “Tax attorney” spikes in spring. “Roof inspection” peaks after storm season. Google Trends shows you these patterns. Plan your content calendar around them — publish seasonal content 6 to 8 weeks before the spike so it has time to index and rank.

Not Updating Your Research

Keyword research is not a one-time project. Search behavior changes, new competitors enter the market, Google changes how it displays results, and new queries emerge. I revisit keyword research for every client quarterly at minimum. What was competitive a year ago might be an easy win today, and what was a goldmine might now be dominated by AI Overviews.

Targeting Keywords Your Site Cannot Win

A brand-new website with 10 pages and no backlinks is not going to rank for “best lawyer in Chicago” against established directories and firms with years of authority. Be realistic about your starting point. Target lower-difficulty keywords first, build authority with consistent quality content, and work your way up to the competitive terms over time.

How Keyword Research Feeds Your Entire Content Strategy

When keyword research is done right, it does not just inform your SEO. It becomes the blueprint for your entire content operation. Here is how the research translates into action:

Service pages are built around your highest-intent transactional keywords — the terms people search when they are ready to hire or buy.
Blog content targets informational and commercial investigation keywords — questions people ask before they are ready to commit.
Location pages are built from your local keyword matrix — every service-location combination that shows real search demand.
FAQ sections come directly from People Also Ask data and long-tail question queries.
Content priorities are set by the intersection of search volume, keyword difficulty, business value, and intent alignment — not guesses about what might be interesting.
Internal linking structure follows your topic clusters — every piece connects to related content in a way that signals topical authority to Google.
Content gaps are identified by comparing your keyword coverage to your competitors' — what topics are they ranking for that you have not addressed yet?

This is what separates a content strategy that drives measurable business results from a blog that publishes random posts and hopes for the best. The keyword research is the map. Everything else is following the map.

Putting It All Together

Keyword research is not glamorous. It is not the exciting part of SEO. But it is the part that determines whether everything else you do actually works. Skip it or do it poorly, and you are building on sand. Do it thoroughly and revisit it regularly, and you have a roadmap that guides every content decision, every page optimization, and every strategic investment you make in your online presence.

The businesses I work with that see the best results are the ones that commit to this process. They do not chase trends or vanity metrics. They understand their audience's search behavior, they target the right keywords with the right content, and they build authority methodically over time.

If you want help building a keyword strategy that actually drives leads and revenue — not just rankings for terms that do not convert — I would be glad to walk you through what this looks like for your specific business. Reach out for a keyword strategy session and let us figure out where your best opportunities are.