How To Turn Keyword Research into a Content Plan

What is keyword research?

Keywords are essentially the words - or phrases - that a user puts into a search engine to find your content. Ranking keywords can indicate what topics or themes your site is relevant to and can aid FAQ and SERP responses. This in turn drives organic traffic to the relevant pages or sites.

Keyword research, therefore, is the process of finding which keywords you should be ranking for. It’s not just about finding the right words or phrases - it plays a crucial role in shaping the entire SEO strategy and helping to achieve broader business goals, predominantly via improved visibility and page clicks. There are many starting points for this and areas to consider, such as: 

• Branding: what is your client’s area of expertise? This will help to identify first draft, or seed, keywords.
• Competitors: who are they, what are they ranking for, and what is their online authority like? This is important as specific areas have keywords that are harder to rank for - if established brands such as the BBC, Healthline, or Government websites dominate the space, you may need to try more niche keywords. 
• Seasonality, trending and evergreen content: What keywords centre around seasonal experiences? For example, a ‘best summer experiences in London’ article probably won’t perform all year, but you will want to revise it in the lead-up to summer. ‘Best things to do in London’ is more universal, but this may be more competitive to rank for.
• Cannibalisation: Are you in a particularly niche field? Or do many of your products overlap? If so, you may end up with multiple pages on your site ranking for the same keywords, effectively becoming your own competitor and creating user confusion. This is called page cannibalisation (or keyword cannibalisation) and is a complicated area that can be straightened out and errors avoided, with a comprehensive content plan and keyword strategy. 

Why is keyword research important?

A solid keyword research strategy will identify gaps in your existing content, and help advise your strategy by providing insights into user intent, keyword relevancy, volumes & niches. Not to mention that it breaks down keyword ranking difficulty and competitors. By streamlining the approach to keyword targeting and methodically avoiding cannibalisation risks you are setting realistic goals for keyword rankings and visibility in the future - a task that becomes much more manageable once you have done your research. 

How to start your keyword research

The first thing you need to consider before generating your keyword list is which keyword tool to use. While Google Trends is a great free option for basic overviews of historical and projected keyword trends, it is less comprehensive than other services. There are many on the market and many offer keyword tools, competitor research capabilities and online tracking systems. We recommend both Semrush and Ahrefs, and for the purpose of this blog I will use Semrush.

For more detailed information read our blog post on Keyword Research Techniques. 

How to generate your keyword list.

Do Your Competitor Research

Once you have run a competitor analysis and identified your main competition, you can run a keyword gap analysis (we use this Semrush tool here) to identify untapped potential on your site. For example, if ASOS was your client, the analysis would look something like this:  

And the result would look like this:

From here, you can export the list of ‘Untapped’ keywords and begin to cluster them together and filter out any that are not relevant or have an unattainably high keyword difficulty. What ‘unattainable’ is, however, will change depending on each client - for example, a new boutique brand would find it difficult to rank for more competitive keywords that brands like Next already rank for, but an established, global brand like ASOS probably could. 

Keyword Grouping Tools 

Once you have your list of competitor keywords, you can identify areas that you would like to rank for and that they’re not ranking for. For example, if you’re ASOS and you know you want to rank for ‘coats’ but none of your competitors is ranking for it, you would want to check why that is - what the keyword volume and difficulty are, and who is ranking for this. 

On Semrush, you can find the highest-ranking URLs and SERP pages by searching the keyword in ‘Keyword Overview’ and scrolling down to SERP analysis. Below are the top 3 search results for the term ‘coats’. 

Above this breakdown is a summary of Keyword Ideas, which can also be used as a second step for your plan - as Semrush gives you a summary of keyword variations, related questions and keyword pillars. 

This is a great place to start considering how to transform your list of seed keywords into a thoughtful and curated content plan. Begin with your seed or topline keywords - these will be your key landing pages. For example, ASOS may have Coats & Jackets, Dresses, Tops, Bottoms and Footwear as their topline keywords. Let’s take ‘Coats’ as our topline keyword, for example. Building out content around this may look something like the below, this is what is often referred to as a keyword pyramid. 

For each keyword pyramid, you will want to cover different search intentions (informational, transactional, or navigational). Some keywords will lend themselves to different content types depending on the user's intent. For example, long tail keywords and question keywords (such as ‘how to wax your Barbour jacket’) have an informational intent and lend themselves to FAQ or Blog content. 

Other keywords (such as ‘Green Women’s Barbour jacket’ or ‘Petite Wax Jacket’) are usually more transactional - meaning the user is out of their ‘researching’ phase and is more likely searching with intent to buy - which lends itself to product pages. 

It is important to consider whether you want one piece of content to have keywords targeting multiple search intents, or if you will have a wider ‘pyramid base’ with more content targeting more specific keywords and key phrases. If you are choosing the latter, be especially careful to target niche keywords and optimise with internal linking to avoid keyword cannibalisation. 

Do you need help with your keyword strategy? Contact our SEO experts

How to turn your Keyword Research into a content plan

Whichever way you choose to format your content plan, there are a few tips and tricks that will help you unlock your keyword performance. 

1. Set up your document to mirror your site navigation, clearly laying out a section for each page. This will help you avoid cannibalisation, which is where multiple pages rank for the same keywords.  
2. Include any existing blog posts and long-form pieces of content that don’t rank highly. You may find there are already opportunities to target long tail keywords without creating lots of new content - you can optimise old blogs with relevant subjects, or add PAA sections where relevant. 
3. Use your competitor research to structure your plan or find gaps in your existing strategy.
4. Pay attention to keyword difficulty. If you are only targeting high-volume, high-difficulty keywords, there is a higher risk that you won’t rank - this is where multiple related keyword targets per page can come in handy. 
5. Aim for a range of primary and secondary keywords on each page. Having a main, broader target keyword is great - but tapping into more niche language and possible PAA or FAQ keywords can bring in a wider audience.  
6. Use internal linking and quality site structure to reduce chances of cannibalisation. Make a note of the most relevant pages that every page should link to, reducing the number of orphan pages and strengthening the site as a whole.
7. Make note of any news and seasonal content. News content will have keywords that spike and drop in volume, whereas evergreen topics have a steadier annual volume. Anticipate when seasonal content will need refreshing to get ahead of the curve and retain backlinks on your piece - update keywords if needed. 

  Building your content calendar

Once you have gathered your keywords and mapped them out with search intent, difficulty and seasonality considered, you can start to put a rollout plan in place. To do this, you will need to take your keyword pyramid and start building a supporting (or intertwined) content calendar. 

A content calendar will provide a structured approach to content rollout with clear dates for content writing and upload. In turn, this will help maintain upload consistency, and employee workload and make monitoring progress easier. As you start to take your keyword research from a content plan into an actionable content calendar, consider the following:

• What are your priority pages? You will want to optimise these first as it can take a few weeks before you start to see the positive results of optimisations. Priority pages could be your biggest-selling product page, landing pages or seasonal pages that are time-sensitive (pre-sale or launch content, for example). 
• Do you have any existing URLs? Consider refreshing the on-page content rather than starting with a new URL where possible, as to retain existing backlinks.
• Realistic rollouts. Budgets and time constraints may mean that you are only able to write and publish 2 pages a month (another reason to identify priority pages early on) so map out realistic dates for when you would like each page to be written, approved and uploaded.  
• Reducing cannibalisation risk. When there are large volumes of pages all targeting keywords with only minor differences (eg. puffer jacket, petite puffer jacket, cropped puffer jacket) there is a high chance of cannibalisation. But to reduce this risk and to promote usability, be sure to implement internal linking - use the pyramid formatting to guide your baseline linking and then expand (internally link) out to other topics or areas of the site where appropriate. Equally, be mindful of terms and phrases you’re using when writing content to avoid accidentally ranking for the wrong keywords. You can track and check which pages are ranking for your target keywords regularly to ensure the appropriate pages are ranking highest for their target keywords too.

Key(word) Takeaways

Keyword research is more than just finding the right words—it’s the foundation of any successful SEO strategy. By identifying relevant keywords, analysing competitors, and structuring a content plan around these insights, you can dramatically improve your site’s visibility, traffic, and leads.

The process starts with defining your brand's focus and using tools like Semrush to uncover untapped opportunities through competitor analysis. From there, grouping keywords into primary and supporting clusters helps optimise both your content and site structure. This approach ensures you rank for a mix of high-volume and long-tail keywords while avoiding keyword cannibalisation.

A strong content plan is key to tapping into SERP opportunities and growing organic traffic. Make sure your strategy accounts for trends, seasonality, and evergreen content to stay ahead of the competition. Regularly refreshing your keyword list and monitoring performance will keep your strategy relevant.

By combining thoughtful keyword research with a structured content plan, your site can achieve long-term SEO success and drive meaningful results.

Contact our team of experts for help elevating your website performance and SEO.