How to Find Keywords for Your Website: A Beginner's Guide

Every page on a small business website is a bet on what customers will search for, and most of those bets are placed without looking. The way to find keywords for your website is to swap that bet for evidence: the phrases customers really use, how many people use them and how strong the pages already competing for them are. A bakery in Lagos might call its work celebration cakes while its customers type birthday cake delivery, and a page built on the wrong phrase can sit unseen for years. None of this calls for a marketing degree or expensive software, only some honest thinking about your customers and a few minutes with the numbers. A free keyword difficulty checker supplies those numbers, showing monthly searches, a difficulty score and the related phrases people type in 40 countries. The method holds whether you are planning your first five pages or adding a post to a site that has run for years. Learn it once and it becomes the first step every time you add something new.

This article is part of our complete guide: AI Keyword Research Tool.

What Keywords Actually Are and Why They Matter for Small Businesses

Keywords are simply the words and phrases people type into a search engine when they want to find something. They might be short and broad, like "accountant", or long and specific, like "accountant for freelancers in Cape Town". Search engines read these queries and try to match them to the most relevant pages on the web, and the pages that match best are the ones that appear on page one. For a small business, this means that the language you use on your website either lines up with what people are searching or it does not, and that gap is the difference between being found and being invisible. Every page you publish is an opportunity to match a real search, but only if the words on the page reflect what people actually type rather than the terminology your industry uses internally. A customer looking for a "wedding cake maker" may never type "artisan confectionery specialist", even if the second phrase is how you describe yourself. Choosing the right keywords, then, is really about learning to see your business through your customers' eyes.

The phrases you target shape not just how many visitors find your site, but how relevant those visitors are. Traffic from people who typed exactly what you offer is far more valuable than a flood of visitors who were looking for something slightly different. A small business does not need to rank for every possible search term in its category, only for the searches its customers are already making, and ideally the ones that indicate real buying intent. This focus is actually an advantage: instead of competing with every large company in your sector for the broadest possible terms, you concentrate on the specific phrases where you can realistically appear. Getting clear on this early saves you from writing pages that attract no one, or worse, attracting people who were never going to buy from you anyway. Every keyword decision is a small bet on which visitors are worth your time and effort to attract.

How to Find Keywords for Your Website Without Any Tools or Experience

The best starting point for keyword research is a blank document and your own knowledge of your customers. Write down the problems people bring to you, using their words as much as possible rather than the technical terms you might use with a colleague. If you run a plumbing business, your customers are probably typing things like "leaking pipe under sink" or "no hot water in shower" rather than "thermostatic valve failure". If you are a yoga instructor, they might search "yoga for beginners near me" or "morning yoga class for back pain". This first list is rough and that is completely fine, because the goal at this stage is to capture the raw material of real searches before you apply any filtering. Think also about the questions people ask before they decide to buy: the "how much does it cost", "how long does it take" and "what is the difference between" questions are all searches someone makes on the way to becoming a customer. Getting these down gives you a foundation that no tool can fully replicate, because it comes from direct experience of your customers' language.

Once you have that initial list, think about the three natural dimensions that most local or service-based searches fall into: location, service type and timing. A person looking for a hairdresser in a hurry might search "same-day haircut appointment Edinburgh", which combines all three. Running through your list with these dimensions in mind often doubles or triples the number of phrases you can work with. Do not worry about whether each phrase has enough searches to be worth targeting at this stage. That filtering comes later, and editing too early cuts off phrases that turn out to be genuinely useful. Once you have a fuller list, take your most promising phrases into a keyword tool and use the related searches it surfaces to expand your list further. The related searches section of a keyword checker shows you how real people vary the same idea, which regularly turns up phrases you would never have thought of on your own. Group similar phrases together at the end of this stage so that each cluster becomes the focus of one specific page, rather than scattering related terms across your whole site without a plan.

How to Read Search Volume and Difficulty So You Know Which Keywords to Use

Search volume is the number reported alongside a keyword that tells you roughly how many people type that phrase each month. It is an estimate rather than a precise count, but it is useful because it gives you a sense of the potential audience for any given page. A phrase with 10 monthly searches is probably too narrow to build a standalone page around unless it is extremely specific to your niche, while a phrase with 10,000 monthly searches might be dominated by large sites that would be very hard to displace. For most small businesses, the productive range sits somewhere in between, where there are enough searches to matter but not so many that every major brand in the world is fighting for the spot. Understanding this range is one of the most useful skills in keyword research, because it stops you from either ignoring keywords entirely or chasing ones that are out of reach. Search volume alone does not tell you whether a keyword is worth targeting, which is why it always needs to be read alongside the difficulty score.

Keyword difficulty is a score, usually expressed as a number from 0 to 100, that estimates how hard it would be to get a page onto the first page of search results for that phrase. It is calculated based on how authoritative and well-optimised the pages currently ranking for that phrase are. A score near zero means that the competing pages are relatively weak and a well-written, focused page on your site could realistically appear near the top. A score near 100 means that every result on page one belongs to an established, heavily authoritative website, and pushing your way in would take years of sustained work. The question to ask for each keyword is whether your site, at its current stage, could realistically compete. A brand new website targeting a keyword with a difficulty of 85 is very unlikely to see any return on that effort, at least not for a long time. Pairing a modest but real search volume with a lower difficulty score is where the real opportunity sits for a small or growing site, because that combination is achievable and still brings in visitors who have genuine intent.

A high volume combined with a very high difficulty is the most common trap for small business owners doing keyword research for the first time. It is tempting to go after the phrase that thousands of people search every month, but if the first page of results is full of major publications and well-funded competitors, your page is unlikely to appear there regardless of how good it is. This does not mean you should never aim for competitive phrases, but they are a long-term goal rather than a starting point. In the early stages of building a site, concentrating on phrases where difficulty is manageable gives you a genuine chance to rank and start building the track record that makes harder keywords more reachable later. Think of it as starting with the matches you can win, which builds the foundation for taking on harder competition over time. Every page that ranks, even for a modest phrase, contributes to the overall authority that your site accumulates.

The Types of Keywords Worth Targeting When You Are Starting Out

Longer, more specific phrases, often called long-tail keywords, tend to have lower difficulty scores because fewer sites have optimised for them directly. A phrase like "natural soap gift set for sensitive skin" is much more specific than "soap", and while fewer people search it, the ones who do are often close to making a purchase. For a small business competing against large retailers, this specificity is an advantage rather than a limitation. The person who types a very specific phrase knows what they want, which means they are more likely to convert into a customer once they land on a relevant page. These phrases also tend to be easier to write naturally into a page, because they describe a real, specific thing rather than a vague category. A whole separate guide on long-tail keywords for small businesses explores this strategy in more detail for those who want to go deeper into it.

Local phrases are another powerful category for businesses that serve a specific area. Including a town, district or region in your keywords often brings the difficulty score down significantly, because the pool of competing pages shrinks to those that also mention that location. "Electrician London" is still competitive, but "electrician Hackney" or "electrician Walthamstow" may have far fewer strong pages targeting them directly. This is a structural advantage that small, locally rooted businesses have over national brands, and it is worth using deliberately. A guide on local keywords covers the details of how to weave location naturally into your pages without making the text feel awkward or forced. The key is to think about how a real person in your area would describe where they are when they search, and then match that language on your site.

Question-based keywords connect naturally to the way people search when they are learning or comparing options. Phrases that begin with "how", "what", "can I" or "which is better" signal that someone is in the research phase of a decision, and a page that answers that question well can appear in results and build trust before the person is ready to buy. Blog posts and guide pages are the natural home for this kind of content, because they give you space to answer a question thoroughly rather than just mentioning it in passing. The guide on how to write blog posts that rank on Google goes into the detail of structuring this kind of content effectively. For those who want to understand how to incorporate keywords without overusing them, the guide on how to use keywords on your website without stuffing them addresses that balance directly. Both are worth reading once you have your first keyword list ready.

Putting It Together and Where to Go Next

Once you have a shortlist of phrases with sensible volume and manageable difficulty scores, the next step is to map each one to a specific page or post on your site. Each page should have one primary keyword it is built around, with related phrases supporting it naturally throughout the text. This mapping exercise prevents two common mistakes: putting every keyword on one page in the hope that it ranks for all of them, and duplicating the same focus across multiple pages so that they compete with each other. A clear map, even if it is just a simple document, makes it much easier to plan new content and spot gaps in what your site currently covers. If you are building your site with AI Web Maker, you can plan this structure before you begin so that each page is created with a purpose from the start. The mapping stage turns keyword research from an abstract exercise into a concrete content plan.

Keyword research is not a task you do once and then forget. As your site grows and attracts more visitors, new search patterns emerge, your industry changes and your business adds new services or products. Revisiting your keyword list every few months helps you find new opportunities, update pages that are close to ranking, and retire terms that are no longer relevant to what you offer. It is also worth checking what is actually driving traffic to your site over time, because this often surfaces phrases you did not deliberately target but that you could lean into more intentionally. The habit of returning to this process regularly is one of the things that separates sites that grow steadily from those that plateau. Treating keyword research as an ongoing practice rather than a one-off setup makes a genuine difference to how your site performs over the long term.

The free AI SEO Tools suite covers related tasks such as checking search volume for individual terms, running difficulty checks across multiple phrases, and exploring the kinds of searches your specific customers make, all without needing to create an account or pay anything. These tools are designed for small business owners who want to make informed decisions about their content without hiring a specialist. Using them regularly, even for a few minutes when you are planning a new page or post, keeps your site aligned with the searches that matter most to your business. The data they surface is the same kind of data professional SEO consultants use, made accessible for people who are running a business rather than specialising in search. The guide on how to add a blog to your website and actually get traffic takes the next practical step for those ready to start publishing content. And for those who want a thorough approach to the research itself, the guide on keyword research for small businesses goes into the full process in depth, covering everything from choosing your first phrases to building a keyword strategy that grows with your business.