Keyword Research for SEO in 2026: Step-by-Step Tutorial

ever wonder why your content doesn't show up on Google it's not random the secret is keyword research and it's the foundation for getting your blog website or videos discovered by the right people in this video I'll show you a simple keyword research method to find the best keywords for your content in five simple steps you see most people waste time on keywords they'll never rank for so I'll show you a simple trick to instantly find the right keywords without hours of research we 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 analyze 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 free normally Sam Rush offers a 7-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 navbar 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 cuz 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 subit you can and that's exactly what this tool helps us find Sam now shows us related keyword ideas their search volumes and competitiveness also called keyword difficulty I'll explain what each metric means right now and then we'll put it into practice 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 Zer being the easiest today there's a ton 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 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 longtail keyword longtail 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 filtered our keywords by volume and difficulty let's move on to step two of our process we'll analyze them to find the best opportunities and start building a list of keywords to include in an article we'll pick Min chocolate chip cookies as our example keyword and open its 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 longtail 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 Ser analysis section we see exactly what's ranking for mini chocolate chip cookies a breakdown of the search engine results page or Ser 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 coll's corner and Chell Suites 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 web Page's 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 Ser 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 searchs 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 sem Rush's keyword Gap tool to find untapped keywords that have search traffic but aren't being leveraged on our site yet navigate to Sam Rush's keyword Gap tool on the left navbar 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 cooking classy.com cwsc corner.com and Chels ses.com these sites Target similar audiences to our primary domain so analyzing 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 signaling 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 zero cooking classie shows up as number 58 in the Google search results for crinkle cookies Co corner at 35 and shell sues 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 99,900 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 recipe notice a lot of these keywords I'm adding are just variations on the mini or small cookie steam 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 lwh 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 week then at the top under filters click position U 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 lwh 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 diet hood.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 prioritize missing keywords when you're planning new content and prioritize weak keywords when you're optimizing existing content by filling these gaps and improving underperforming Pages we can create a data driven content strategy that aligns with real search demand now that we have a list of keywords we'd like to Target let's organize 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 17.7 th000 and an average keyword difficulty of 14.05% this is great if we click volume we can sort high to 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 sames will take a few minutes to a process clustering keywords just means grouping similar topics together so our content is more organized 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 content Shake 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 going to 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 readon 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 content Shake 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 content Shake 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 customizing it when you're ready to export the arle click publish from here you can publish directly to a WordPress site if you have 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 summarize 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 6 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 Sam rash'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 prioritizes 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 favorite 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 thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video