Keyword Research Guide: Relevancy, Competition & SERP Analysis
SE Ranking's Keyword Research tool helps you uncover the metrics that drive keyword strategy: search volume, keyword difficulty, search intent, and cost-per-click.
Beyond basic metrics, the tool surfaces competitive insights by tracking organic and paid SERP history dating back to February 2020, helping you understand which sites currently dominate your target keywords.
The Keyword Grouper organizes keywords into strategic clusters based on shared SERP results, with adjustable accuracy levels that reflect your site's structure, enabling you to plan content and information architecture more efficiently.
You can discover hidden opportunities through related keywords, low-volume searches, and question-based queries that competitors might miss.
Once you've identified promising keywords, the Keyword Manager lets you save, organize, and monitor keyword lists across regions without launching a full tracking project.
To get in-depth insights into any keyword in both organic and paid search, evaluate its competitive landscape, and broaden a site’s list of target keywords, take advantage of the Keyword Research tool. By the way, you can enter multiple search queries, or upload a TXT or CSV file with keywords here to get summary data on all of them at the same time. Let’s enter a keyword we wish to analyze into the search box, choose a country from the dropdown menu, and click “Analyze”. Once the information is ready, you will find a detailed summary of the analyzed keyword's activities in both organic and paid search under the Overview tab. Here, you'll find critical metrics that make it easier to prioritize keywords for your website's marketing strategies, including: the Keyword Difficulty Score that lets you know how hard it will be to get a keyword to rank among the top 10 search results. the Search Volume that shows how many times a keyword is searched for on Google per month in the chosen country or region, plus there’s the seasonal trend graph and the global search volume. the Search Intent that tells you why users may be running a search for a keyword and
what type of content they expect to see. the Cost-per-click that lets you know how much it costs to get a click from search for the keyword in your Google Ads campaign. And here you can also see the Google Ads competition level. Note that the tool enables you to view historical data on keywords, tracing back to February 2020. Further down, you can find a lot of new keyword ideas for your website, as well as discover the top-ranking websites for the analyzed keyword in both organic and paid search. You’re welcome to access more data by clicking on the View detailed report button or navigating the sidebar. Next, let’s explore the Keyword Suggestions tab. With the help of this module, you can build your site’s keyword list from scratch or expand an existing one. Under the Similar keywords tab, you’ll find a list of keywords that are very close in meaning, contain the analyzed keyword or have a different ending. Next to each keyword, we have a list of main parameters that can help you understand things like the keyword’s difficulty, search volume, cost per click, and competition. You can also view the top 100 search results for each query, including traffic forecasts, cost,
and the number of keywords the site ranks for. Plus, you’re free to analyze the keyword trend. The Related Keywords section offers alternate queries that share the same URLs in the top 100 search results, with additional data under the Relevance column. Filtering and keyword grouping options are available here to help you pinpoint the most promising keywords for your campaigns, alongside tabs providing Questions and Low-search-volume keywords for deeper insights. This tab lists the top 100 organic search results for the analyzed keyword, along with relevant data on traffic and backlinks. Clicking a URL will direct you to the Competitive Research tool where you can continue the analysis, find keyword gaps, and more. To learn more, be sure to check out our video on the Competitive Research tool. The Organic SERP History feature allows you to see the Top 100 search results for the keyword you are researching and get month-to-month comparisons of each site, going back to February 2020. Explore additional website metrics here to learn who you may be going up against in organic search, and click on a website to see how its positions change each month.
Under the Ads History tab, you’ll find websites that target the analyzed keyword in their Google Ads campaigns along with their traffic forecast, estimated monthly traffic cost, the total number of keywords they rank for in search, and a preview of the ad itself. Click on the "Expand ads" button to see all of the ads broken down by month, as well as the ad copy itself. As you’re going through a long list of keywords during your research, you may not want to immediately start tracking all of their rankings. To help you stay on top of important keywords without a project, we’ve developed the Keyword Manager. Add, update, and save keyword lists for different regions in one place as well as keep an eye on how keyword metrics and search results change over time. Besides adding keywords to the Keyword Manager for later use, you can also add them to your project for tracking as well as use them as a basis to create a new piece of content. And that is it! We have reviewed every corner of the Keyword Research tool. To help you organize your website's keywords into relevant groups or clusters,
take advantage of the Keyword Grouper tool. To start working with the tool, you first need to have a list of keywords. You’re welcome to collect them through Keyword Suggestions in the Keyword Research tool. Once your keyword list is ready, name your report, then select the country, specify the location (which could even be a city or a zip code), and also be sure to select the Google interface language for your target audience. Next, set the grouping accuracy level between 1 and 9, depending on your website's structure and needs. This will define how many URLs two keywords need to have in common on their respective SERPs to be grouped together. For example, if you set the accuracy level to 5, then two keywords will be grouped together only if they share at least 5 URLs in their SERPs. Then, choose the keyword grouping method. Soft grouping yields fewer groups with more keywords each, while hard grouping creates more groups with perfectly matched keywords. The tool can also check the search volume of your keywords during the grouping process. This can help you identify your most promising keywords and filter out unpopular ones.
Finally, you can add your keywords manually or import them from a file before starting the grouping process. Once completed, you can analyze the grouping results under the respective tab. Here you can review a list of your keyword groups and see how many search queries there are in each group. Click through to a specific keyword group to see what keyword clusters were created, what their total search volumes are, and how many keywords there are in each cluster as a result of the grouping accuracy level. By expanding a keyword cluster, you’ll be able to see which exact keywords are in it, their individual search volumes, how many top-ranking SERP players they have in common, a list of organic competitors, and even view a list of keywords highlighted in bold in Google snippets. And at the end, you'll find ungrouped keywords. You can manually group them, create new pages, or delete them. When you’re done, export your keyword groups in the preferred file format. And that's it! SE Ranking's Keyword Grouper is a powerful tool that can save you time and money while improving your SEO. If you have any questions,
reach out to us or visit our knowledge base. Thank you for choosing SE Ranking and happy SEOing!