Glossary /Foundations
Keyword Research
Finding the language a market uses for its problem, and deciding which of those phrases are worth building a page around.
Keyword research is market research that happens to produce a list. The valuable output is not the volume column; it is learning the words buyers use for a problem, which are almost never the words a company uses for its product.
Volume is the most over-weighted number in the exercise. A term with 100 searches a month from people ready to buy is worth more than 10,000 searches from people writing a dissertation, and the tools cannot tell you which is which. Difficulty scores have the same problem: they are a proxy for backlinks, not for whether you can credibly answer the question.
The practical filter is three questions. Can we answer this better than what currently ranks? Does the person asking it have the problem we solve? Is there a page format we can build that matches what the engine is already rewarding? A term that fails any of them is a distraction regardless of its volume.