Keyword and topic research

What keyword and topic research is

Keyword and topic research is the work of finding out what your buyers type into a search box, in their own words, and sorting those searches by how close each one sits to a purchase. It ends in a spreadsheet you can act on: one row per search, and a recommendation of which page should answer it.

It is not a strategy, and it is not writing. The SEO content strategy decides the order and the budget; this is the raw material it is built from. It is also not search intent research, which goes deeper into what each individual search wants. This service records intent at a coarse level; that one argues it out page by page.

Who this is for

An owner or marketer who is about to write, commission or rebuild a set of pages and wants them aimed at searches people actually make. It also suits a business whose blog has been written from the inside, on subjects the team finds interesting, while the searches buyers make go unanswered.

It is not for a business that already has a keyword list from a tool and cannot see what to do with it. That is a sorting and judgement problem, and the strategy handles it directly. Nor is it for a site that has never had its existing pages looked at; do the SEO content audit first, or you will research subjects you already cover.

What gets looked at

Four sources, in this order, because each one corrects the last.

Your own search data. The searches that already bring people to the site, from the search console you give me read access to. This shows what you rank for by accident, which is often not what you sell.

Your sales conversations. The questions in your inbox, your quote requests and your phone notes. A search is a question typed instead of asked, and the words customers use on the phone are the words they type.

The results pages themselves. For each candidate search I look at what is currently shown: a map, a list of products, a lifted answer, a set of articles, or supplier websites. What is shown tells you what the search is for. A results page full of suppliers is a buying search; a page full of explainers is a learning search.

Keyword tools. Used last, to find the variants and the related searches around each subject, and to give a rough sense of how often each is typed. Their volume figures are estimates and the report labels them as such.

Every search that survives is then sorted into one of three groups: a person who wants a supplier, a person comparing options, and a person learning. Only the first two get a page recommendation in the first round.

What you get

The keyword sheet. One spreadsheet, one row per search, usually 60 to 150 rows for a business with one main service line. Columns: the search as typed, the subject it belongs to, what the searcher wants, how close it sits to a purchase, whether you already have a page that could answer it, and the page I recommend, new or existing.

The topic map. Two to four pages. The searches grouped into the six to twelve subjects they belong to, with a note on which subjects you can own and which are held by a competitor with far more pages than you. This is the part that stops you writing forty posts on a subject you will never win.

The walkthrough. Forty-five minutes on video, with whoever will write or commission the pages, so the sheet does not sit unread.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A two-location physiotherapy clinic has 20 pages and a blog of 35 posts about stretching. Their search data shows the site already appears for a few searches about "ICBC physio claim" and nothing for the clinic's main services. Their inbox shows the same five questions every week: whether a referral is needed, whether a claim covers it, how many sessions, what the first visit costs, and whether they treat a particular condition.

The research produces 84 searches in nine subjects. Twenty-two are buying searches: a service plus a town, or a condition plus "physio near me". Sixteen are comparison searches about claims and coverage. The rest are learning searches about exercises, which the blog already covers and which bring no inquiries. The sheet recommends eleven new pages, all in the first two groups, and marks the stretching posts as low priority. The clinic writes the referral page first, because it is the question asked most often and no competitor has answered it plainly.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, where, to whom, and what you already know about how customers find you. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope and number agreed before anything starts.
3. Access and material. Read-only access to your search and analytics data, and a forward of the questions customers ask, in whatever form you have them.
4. The research. Five to eight working days for one service line in one region. More lines or more regions add time, and the quote says how much.
5. The walkthrough. The sheet and the topic map arrive the day before the call so you can read them cold.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. The price depends on how many service lines you sell, how many regions you serve, and whether you already have clean search data or I have to build the picture from your inbox and the results pages alone. The pricing page shows how fixed pricing works here and the published bands for the services that have them.

What happens next

Most people take the sheet in one of two directions. They ask for an SEO content strategy, which puts the recommended pages in order against a budget and a calendar. Or they go straight to the writing: SEO landing pages for the buying searches and supporting articles for the comparison ones. If the research finds that the searches you can win all have a place name in them, the next step is local SEO pages instead.