How to do keyword research for a small business

Big, broad searches such as 'marketing' or 'accounting' attract mostly people who are researching, and they are fought over by sites with far more authority than yours. Specific searches like 'VAT registration for freelancers in Dubai' or 'emergency boiler repair Croydon' are typed by people who already know what they need. They only lack the business that provides it.

These searches often show low volumes in keyword tools, sometimes zero. That is not a reason to skip them. A query typed twenty times a month by people ready to buy can be worth more than one typed two thousand times by people who are browsing, and far fewer competitors have built a page that targets it directly.

1. List what you sell and who buys it. Every service, product, customer type and location you cover. Write down the words customers use on calls and in emails, not your internal jargon.
2. Mine Search Console. In the Performance report, look for queries where your pages already sit between roughly positions 6 and 25. Google already associates you with them, so a dedicated or improved page often moves them up fastest.
3. Expand with a keyword tool. Google Keyword Planner is free, though accounts without active ad spend may see volumes as ranges. Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz give estimates and let you see which keywords competitors rank for.
4. Read the live results for every candidate. Search it yourself. Note what type of page ranks (service pages, lists, guides, directories), whether the top results put the keyword in their title and heading, and how established those sites are.
5. Group by intent. If two keywords return near-identical results, Google treats them as one intent and one page should target both. If the results differ, they need separate pages.
6. Prioritise. Rank the list by how likely a searcher is to buy and how open the results look. Build the best of both first.

Tool difficulty scores are estimates, and different tools often disagree. The results page itself is the better evidence. A keyword looks open when the pages ranking do not target it directly (it is missing from their titles and headings), when smaller sites are ranking, or when the results are generic pages that only half answer the search.

Our own research taught us not to trust the scores alone. When we checked UAE keywords in August 2026, one term a tool rated at zero difficulty turned out to have a directory and a long-established agency holding the top results. Reading the page took a minute and saved weeks of effort.

One main intent, plus its natural variants. A page about 'office fit-out in Dubai' can also rank for 'office fit out company Dubai' and 'office interior fit-out' because they share an intent. Two pages chasing the same intent compete with each other, so merge them or make their focus distinct.

Put the primary keyword where Google and searchers look first: the title tag, the H1, the URL and the opening sentence. Then write the page for the person, covering what they need to decide. Our guide to the top ranking factors explains why intent match matters more than repetition.

Keep them in one sheet with the keyword, estimated volume, intent, a note on what the results show and the page that targets it. Track rankings weekly for the pages you build. Revisit the list each quarter: as your site earns links, keywords that looked out of reach become realistic. Keyword research is the first stage of every SEO engagement we run.