If you work with the inbound marketing process, you likely already know that one of its pillars is to attract traffic to your content. But not all visitors are the same: we desire them to be “quality” users, who fit our buyer persona and who are genuinely curiousin our products and services.
To accomplish this goal, SEO and inbound marketing must go hand in hand. If we tend to rank ourselves on Google for the terms most appropriate to our brand, we will be able to generate this flow of quality traffic naturally. But how can we be sure that we are discovering the most relevant terms for our brand? The answer lies in keyword research.
How to Effective Keyword Research Step-by-step
Keyword research involves finding search terms that are relevant to our brand, in order to structure our content around them and rank them at the top of Google when a user searches for them.
To do good keyword research, we have to harmonize different needs: that the word is related to what we offer, that it is appropriate to our business objectives, that it has a sufficient number of searches to be worthwhile, and that it is not saturated, among others. Let’s see how to do it step by step.
1) Identify your Short Tail and Long Tail Terms
One distinction we need to be very clear about before we start is the words “short tail” and “long tail.”
Short-tail keywords are the most generic. They usually have one or two words at most. They tend to attract a large volume of searches, so most companies in the sector seek to rank themselves with them and the competition is very high.
On the other hand, long-tail keywords are longer and more specific. They attract fewer searches than short-tail keywords, but in exchange, they are easier to rank for.
What makes long-tail keywords interesting is that, being specific, they offer us much more information about the user who is doing the search and therefore we can more easily know if they are of interest to us as a lead or not.
Another important aspect that we must take into account in our keyword research is the user’s intention. Some searches are informative, for example, “What is advertising”, while others indicate that a user is interested in buying or contracting a service. Both types of keywords can have their place in our strategy, but always keep in mind that they correspond to different moments in the customer’s life cycle and that therefore the content we offer must also be different for each of them.
2) Look for Ideas
Now, we need to generate a list of terms that are related to our brand and that combine short-tail and long-tail keywords with different intentions.
For ideas, we can turn to three main sources:
- An internal brainstorming session in which the entire team starts looking for and writing down keywords. The idea is to let your imagination run wild as much as possible, without worrying too much about whether a suggested keyword is “good” or not; there will be time to filter in the next step.
- Analyze the competition. There are specialized tools that can tell us what keywords a specific domain ranks for, so they can help us get an idea of the competition’s strategy. It’s also a good idea to review their websites and see what keywords seem to predominate in their content.
- Review our buyer persona. We will try to empathize with him, see what his needs are, and, based on them, what kind of searches he could be doing on Google.
3) Analyze Searches and Competition
Once we have a list of potential search terms, it’s time to filter. To do this, I recommend paying special attention to two aspects: the number of searches for the keyword per month and the competition. We can obtain this data with one of the tools we discuss in the next section.
Discard keywords that have less than 50 searches per month, since they will not generate enough traffic to compensate for the effort of creating specialized content. But there are some exceptions, for example, words that do not have a large search volume right now but that we know will be a trend in the future. Betting on these types of words to position yourself before the competition is usually a great idea.
The second parameter we are going to look at is competition in SEO ranking. Normally, keyword research tools tell us if the competition is high, medium, or low. High competition means that there are many competing companies trying to position themselves for that search term, making it more difficult to reach the top positions in Google search results.
Ideally, we would find keywords that are very relevant to us, that have a high number of searches, and where the competition is low, but this is not always possible. Therefore, if you are just starting, the recommendation is that you look for long-tail terms with low competition, even if they have fewer searches per month.
Keyword Research Tools for SEO in 2025
Conducting keyword research without the right tools would be practically impossible, as we would have no way of knowing the search volume and competition for a keyword. In addition, these tools can also give us ideas for related terms that we might not have thought of.
Google Keyword Tool
The essential basic for any SEO expert. To use it, you need to have an open Google Ads account and have included a payment method. In addition, the results will be more accurate if you have an active campaign at the time of your search.
To use this tool in your inbound marketing campaigns, I recommend that you follow this process:
Go to the “View search volume and forecasts” tab and paste all the long-tail keywords you obtained in the previous steps. Remember to segment by the search country and the period you are interested in.
Next, you’ll see three options in the top menu: “Forecasts,” “Negative Keywords,” and “History Metrics.” Click on the latter to see the information you’re interested in for your keyword research, such as the number of monthly searches from desktop and mobile.
Sort the terms by “Average monthly searches” to see the ones with the most searches. You can also check the competitiveness here.
Finally, one piece of data that can help you is to see the average cost per click for that keyword in Google Ads. Even if we are looking to do SEO and not SEM, it is an interesting metric because if there are many companies bidding on a specific keyword, that indicates that it can be valuable for achieving conversions.
Ubersuggest
This keyword analysis tool from Neil Patel is free and requires no registration. Its main functionalities are to give long-tail keyword suggestions based on a seed term and to view trend data and search volume for each keyword.
To use it, simply type the word into the search box and select the language and country combination you prefer. Click “Search” and you will be taken to a results page with the following data:
- Monthly search volume.
- SEO positioning difficulty.
- SEM positioning difficulty.
- Average cost per click.
- Chart showing the evolution of search volume by month (very useful for detecting seasonal or trending keywords).
- Long-tail keyword ideas related to the term we searched for. To view them, go to “Keyword Ideas”. For example, if we enter “digital marketing”, it will show us terms such as “digital marketing course”, “digital marketing for SMEs” or “Digital marketing agency in Mumbai”.
Semrush
Semrush is another of the most popular tools among web positioning and digital marketing experts.
This tool has a free version, but it limits the number of searches, queries or reports that can be made per day. If you are a professional in inbound marketing and SEO, it is worth getting a paid account.
Semrush has a very interesting feature for keyword research focused on content marketing: the synonym keyword finder. Here’s how to use it:
Once you are inside the tool’s intranet, click on “Keyword Research”.
You will see a new tool called Keyword Magic Tool appear. Once inside, you will need to go to “Related”.
You will be able to see a report that shows other terms included in internet content with the keyword you searched for, as well as terms that users search for right after this keyword. So here are plenty of ideas for developing content related to the initial keyword.
Google Trends
Although this is not strictly an SEO ranking tool, we include it because it can be very useful in identifying search trends.
When doing keyword research, you should not only think about the keywords that are useful to you now, but also those that will be useful in the future. Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term investment, and ranking at the top of Google can take time. Therefore, you want to select terms that will be relevant for many years or even grow.
Google Trends allows you to find out the popularity of a search term, compare it to others, and see how it has evolved over time. The popularity of a keyword is expressed with a value from 0 to 100 (100 being the most popular).
Another very useful feature is to see which are the most popular keywords in a country and the interest they generate in each sub-region.
