Effective keyword research is an essential step in content creation and SEO. It’s the difference between your work being found and not!

Optimizing for the right keywords can boost your impressions, clicks, and ROI; however, doing it manually requires expertise and hours of tedious work.

Surfer’s Keyword Research automates the entire process for you, helping you create an SEO-maximized content strategy in no time.

2. Identify a keyword that best represents the overall topic you wish to create content around (for example, a bakery or recipe blog might want to position itself for search queries related to the “cookies” keyword).

3. Type your keyword into the Keyword bar and double-check the region settings (ask yourself where you want to rank geographically). For best results, be broad, but ensure the keyword matches your audience’s search intent. 

4. When your Keyword Research has finished loading, click on it to be taken to a summary page. You’ll see topic clusters related to your input keyword.

5. You can think of topic clusters as potential articles. Within each cluster, you’ll see a number of keywords related to each other, to an identified search intent, and to the main keyword used to create the query.

Find a cluster you wish to create content for, and click the purple pencil icon in the bottom right of the cluster’s box to review data points and check included keywords. If everything looks good, open Content Editor with a single click and get down to business!

Before you proceed to learn about Content Editor, we encourage you to check out the list of tips & tricks below!

Choose a relatively broad keyword, and don't waste your queries on narrow, long-tailed ones, as they will generate only a few suggestions for your website. What you are looking for are keywords that are simultaneously broad enough to generate a lot of suggestions to choose from and narrow enough to match your target audience’s search intent.

Topic clusters are organized by relevance to each other and to search intent. Surfer recognizes 4 types of search intent:

Each topic cluster can be considered a single article. However, you should choose your clusters carefully. Consider whether the cluster will allow you to develop your E-E-A-T on a topic you want to position yourself on.

You can cross data from your Google Search Console with Keyword Research to reveal all the critical clusters that you are not ranking for yet and to learn about your relative keyword difficulty. We sort the topics by their relevance to your domain.

The "Missing" tab is your prioritized list of articles you should consider adding to your website.

You can complete 100 Keyword Research queries per day. This means you can be as thorough as necessary and identify the perfect topic cluster for your needs!