I don’t really start keyword research with a process. That’s the honest answer. Most of the “process” talk makes it heavier than it needs to be.
I usually just open Google and start typing whatever the niche is. Half the time I don’t even finish the thought, just see what autocomplete throws at me. That alone already shows how people are actually searching, not how tools think they search. Then I scroll through “people also ask” and related searches at the bottom. That part is messy but it’s real. You can see how one idea splits into ten different directions.
I also look at competitor pages, not to copy anything, just to notice what keeps repeating. If every page in a niche keeps circling the same topics, that’s usually where attention is sitting. Sometimes I’ll even jump to YouTube search or Reddit just to see how people phrase things when they are not trying to sound “SEO correct.” It’s often more honest there.
I don’t spend much time organizing anything at this stage. I just collect phrases and move on. If you try to structure too early, you end up filtering out useful stuff without even realizing it.
The one thing I always come back to is intent. That’s the only part that actually matters.
Same keyword can mean completely different things. Someone searching “SEO tools” could be learning, comparing options, or ready to buy. If you miss that, you can rank and still get useless traffic. I’ve seen that happen a lot. Pages look fine on paper but bring nothing that matters.
So I’d rather target something smaller with clear intent than chase big volume keywords that are vague. Volume looks nice in reports, but intent is what decides if traffic is worth anything.
After that, I do a quick check using SeoSets. That’s my own platform, around $10 a month, built it because most tools felt too heavy for no reason. I just use it to scan what’s actually ranking and if there’s real movement or just noise. I don’t sit there comparing difficulty scores for hours. If something looks forced or empty, I drop it.
Then I group things together instead of treating every keyword as separate. One page usually ends up covering multiple related searches anyway. People don’t search in clean isolated terms, they search in patterns. I learned this after building a few pages that were too narrow and basically went nowhere.
So yeah, nothing fancy. Start messy, follow real search behavior, focus hard on intent, and don’t get too attached to keyword lists.
