Keyword Research in 2025: Advanced SEO Workflow with SE Ranking + ChatGPT

Hello, my name is Matt Bailey and I've been an SEO for over 30 years. I'm an active SE ranking user. And in this video, I'm going to show you the keyword research and organizational techniques that have powered my SEO success for thousands of clients. You see, yesterday's SEO required you to download and analyze thousands of keywords. And what I'm going to show you used to take four to five days of crunching exported keyword lists. But now it can be done within moments and faster, better, and more efficiently with chat GBT. The objective of keyword research is not simply to find the highest demand or the most searched keywords. That is a surface level approach. The objective is to know the market, the searcher, better than your client does. Understanding how people search, the context of their words, their intent, needs, description, timing, and motivation. Only then will

you be able to create website content that moves searchers to become customers. This knowledge goes beyond driving traffic, which will happen. It drives conversions. For one of my clients, when we implemented this, organic clicks doubled and conversions went from 2% to 5% and still growing using these exact techniques. To do this, start with your seed list, the top five to 10 non-branded terms that describe your business or describe a problem that people are trying to solve. You can also use SE Rankings idea finder. For my example, I'm using vinyl records or vinyl albums. The detailed report gives me nearly 12,000 related keywords. And here's the timesaver. Just hit export. You can also download the related keyword list if you like, but I always recommend exporting the questions list. This is critical. I love questions because searcher questions contain more context and intent. My goal is to get at least 2,000 keywords. More is better.

with a variety of contextually relevant words regardless of search volume. I want to capture the broad view of the topic which enables us to examine the many facets of searcher and market intent because I'm analyzing language and not numbers. I delete everything in the spreadsheets except for the keywords. Then I combine all of the keywords into one document and upload it to chat GBT. And now the fun begins. First prompt to group the keywords by topic. I asked chat GBT to define the topics and you can see some of my prompts as an example. This saves you hours of organization by analyzing thousands more keywords than you could do manually and it gets directly to the insights of what searchers need. Review these topics to make sure that there is clear differentiation between the topics. Look to see where some topics can be merged or where there's too many and they need to be split out. I'll review these topics and before moving on, I'll interrogate chat GBT with

additional questions. This is where you uncover the real keyword gold. I've included a few prompts that I use, but one that I really like asking here is what keywords do not fit any specific category or are outliers from the topics list. Those kinds of questions enable you to dig deep into the words and find things that only hundreds of hours of human review would uncover. Next, ask chat GBT to group the keywords by intent. Intent shows you what people want to do. In this stage, I'm looking for words that reflect a clear purpose, such as buy, compare, see, or how to. This helps me align my content and calls to action to the searcher'sformational needs. Dig further into intent by asking for topics or keywords that suggest urgency. These words reveal highly motivated searchers who are looking for an immediate solution which you can respond to with paid ads or specific content. Let's start over. Group the keywords again by buying cycle. This

type of prompt will organize your keywords into a logical buying or decision cycle. You can have chat GPT do this automatically or you can specify grouped by your model such as awareness, interest, consideration, and decision. whatever fits your model or business stages the best. This view of your keywords will help you organize and craft your content, addressing the concerns and questions of searchers in each stage. Don't always settle for the first thing that chat GPT or any AI gives you. Treat the AI like the expert and interrogate it. Challenge it by asking specific questions to reveal more insights about your business. Treat this like a conversation about your keywords instead of a report and you'll be rewarded. Finally, dig into some structural help for writing headlines and topics. I take my primary topic like the word vinyl. Then I'll prompt for a matrix style list with the word vinyl in the middle and then structure the words that come before vinyl and the words

that typically come after the word vinyl. It should look a bit like a word cloud, but reflects the usage of the word in multiple contexts. This helps me as I'm writing H1s or headlines to see the string of thinking that people use before after the main keyword. If you would like this type of report along with search counts, try SE rankings content idea finder and it will give you that report. These organizational techniques allow you to evaluate a topic like a gemstone. each facet uncovering additional insights that inform you about your target market, providing more understanding of the searcher intent andformational needs. Use these insights as you plan your content as this ensures that you have thorough topical coverage of a subject structured in a way that reaches searchers at their point of need. Be it early decision cycle, educational content, comparative content, or ready to buy, you'll have matched their journey.