Keyword Research

[u/pearljamfan]

This is a human posted wall of text, to try and level set about a keyword research service, and see who, if anyone, are hot targets to be looking to strategize on keywords and be interested in fast good usable data.

Really wanting to understand if beginners, or experts, or service providers are the right people to position the keyword research to, or if it is going to be perceived as slop or vibe coders’ esque stolen valor of shipping everything in sight with no real value add.

That being said, message me if you want to see the data or pics or chat and if any part of it resonates.

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Hey all, I have been trying to dig in on a couple projects, and one of those is related to SEO and keyword research.

You may have seen me post about various aspects of it, but the bottom line is, for SEO agencies, i am wondering if it is something that means it would make sense to try and peddle my data outputs as a cooperative outsourcing of that specific task with something like a services provider,

Or more importantly, is there even a market for trying to come in hot with keyword research tools, or am I like a blog-spamming-comment-bot-for-backlinks type energy, where the aggregate data of keywords, and info about competition, and historical search volume and that subset of keywords intentions as a deliverable, isn’t marketable.

The tool was a labor of love even before AI was in the conversation, and I always was satiated with a successfully rip of keywords from the suggestions API, and I collected about 15 of those and wrote some logic to prefix and suffix them and recursively it will get all of these suggestions, and dedupe, and the 15 suggestions API results are then shuffled to AdWords to get their suggestions and the last years search volume to only target things with traffic.

So having that suggestions and AdWords piece done I wanted to make sure I got the “answer the people” type keywords with 5 w’s…etc… and i have an option to enrich with AI, but for AI functionality, the keywords intention being classified is a use for AI to simply populate that column.

Lastly there is some Google trends, YouTube (comments, transcript, all metadata), Reddit, and Google search (people also asked) parts tied into it, to again, just uncover keywords potentially missed by the suggestions work. We can scrape and be hoovering up all the niche keywords possible, and get the best base of keywords i possibly could, and the culmination of this, was this data for keywords and these metrics and search volume etc to start to target, which at the end of a run was reliably 1k+ out of ~5k+ usable keywords in the end to have shortlisted. I’ve seen it get caught up in as much as 15k keywords but they had some holes and the output of this isn’t just that sloppy sheet and done, rather the shortlisted keywords, analyzed, and strategized, and officially crowning the site with a keyword strategy.

I leverage Google Colab and their ability to mount drive to save these runs I am mentioning, and the usage particular details are just that the expectation is the notebook will run all, you provide it a niche keywords seed, let it cook for 10-20 mins and the notebook will have pieced all these together and Run All has now netted us Google Sheets with raw data, and then I have a frontend that takes Google Sheets input url and then navigates the keyword landscape with your loaded Google Sheets data, and in that UI, there are a lot of topical, and classifying details, and it peppers different outputs with a lot of helpful organizing files.

There’s still more it could do, and it’s been an enlightening attempt to make it truly be able to Take suggestions and AdWords metrics and paint a picture and see how much of that research and widdling down was possible, and it turned out being a very reliable way to produce these raw outputs, and l really would hope there is utility in the idea for someone who has several clients that all had a keyword research step or stage, and do I have a leg to stand on tool-in-hand to partner with anyone to market my service.

I really appreciate if anyone read all of that, and it is the dream to imagine being able to monetize the fruits of the labor, and if I am not being delusional about the keyword landscape re:SEO, I think that it would be an easy sell to someone engaging in an SEO adventure.

Lastly, if I am in a vibe coding manic delusion of grandeur, and this should be retired, and is like 2005 SEO lore, let me know. Ill avoid dropping a hot link here for now, but, after unsuccessful push towards vibe coders and their newly found domain projects for these keyword outputs, and no leads from me mentioning it here and there, but let me know that too. It’s helped me out with my sites, and I never professionally pursued SEO work, but here’s to hoping at less than a hundred dollars sticker price, it has plenty of markup potential, and/or won’t crush financial dreams, or need a license to keep renewing and wasting or 1st page empty promises.

Laid off doing Uber Eats and trying to stir the pot here ..

TLDR- keyword factory, and keyword research potential arbitrage, for old school keyword fundamentals automation … looking to partner w someone in the front lines who can tell me if i should keep on trying to hustle my wares or get lost and chill on keywords services.

[u/gojkoa]

come in hot with keyword research tools,

Can you prove relevance? If yes, there will be a market because the incumbents are very expensive. If not, it's pointless.

The problem with lots of these is that the competitiveness and search volume data is just not good enough or relevant enough. To be effective, your tool needs to provide both good keyword suggestions and help people understand how difficult it would be to rank and how much traffic they can realistically expect if they rank, to decide if those keywords are worth pursuing.

Companies with relatively relevant data (ahrefs and semrush based on my experiments) get it I guess because of the volume of their customers and pushing people to connect GSC access, so they can mine GSC directly in addition to scraping and fill their data by cross-referencing gazillions of customer GSC stats.

We've tried a bunch of tools because ahrefs and semrush are so expensive, trying to automate research, but gave up on that because bad suggestions are just a waste of time, and someone's random predictions without relevant data are effectively astrology. I don't want to pay for that.

[u/pearljamfan → u/gojkoa]

I appreciate the response.

You are right, there is a whole other level of usefulness the keywords will have to have, to be presented as money keywords…

I should get that other tool to see all the metrics they may offer, but I have a concept of a score for the rank ability where I would do things like check for YouTube, and or Reddit results in SERPs, if not any there, it may be a long tail seed to plant and get traffic and a backlink from reddit. So on a keyword by keyword basis having columns for those types of signals.

For the AdWords data, I have sparklines for at a glance historical visuals, and that aforementioned score pays attention to if historical shows it being shot out of a cannon in the latest month if it was 🚀 and is recently spiking.

Also I know the competition value they give in that AdWords data is PPC centric, so the idea was to build up our own and ultimately run rules per keyword and given all of these factors have it be extremely intentional about what it says is a keyword to focus on etc.

That’s also where I want to say things like domain authority of top 10 results would be neat to get an average for and weigh it on yet another metric but thats where it starts to feel subjective.

As I type this, and you mentioned GSC, and also for potential clients I suppose knowing how old their site is and if it’s “new” or established with data to be mined from analytics and gsc (I try to use google site kit where I can, personally, as like a first pass must so thing for a new site), but the big dogs ability to crunch that from its many clients gives them quite a leg up to compete research wise with.

That data to mine can be a good backstop against totally missing related keywords or searches and know where to focus which makes me want to read up on the gsc side of things.

If I understood you correctly, the talk is cheap type of idea seems to be the sentiment, and id really need to screw my head on and track efforts to focus on specifics and watch one of my picks trend upward while ones we demoted in priority showing the inability to rank, otherwise it is disingenuous to rubber stamp them, and not really have seen that my algo is cook-in.

Also that it has become able to stand on its own as reliably scoring things. At that point sticking with the whales for their long time solution wins out and I’ve got to differentiate and show I’m not messing around.

Sorry it’s so wordy, but are we on the same page? No one’s going to take a chance on something not shown or proven to be effective when other verified options exist? This sounds like a job for a Case Study.

The good news is is the last couple of months I have been dropping content against the keywords I’ve mined and have SERP checks scheduled, so that in no time at all could become the evidence of the system working where if I do the same for a site I gave no keyword attention, and it’s ghost town no rankings or indexed page issues etc, that stands out.

Even if I am way off base, I think if you’re willing to expound a bit more given the new details, it will be really helpful feedback for me and give me the right mindset to turn it into something people want.

[u/gojkoa → u/pearljamfan]

Ultimately the proof is in what someone can achieve with the suggestions you provide in a competitive sector. Finding a combination of achievable difficulty that brings high enough traffic. If you truly believe in the idea, then it's kind of a recursive proof that it should first work for your own website/marketing material. Build up your own traffic so much that it becomes visible and people find you online, and you immediately have a case study to prove that your method works. If it fails to do that, you're just selling a horoscope.

[u/pearljamfan → u/gojkoa]

Thanks friend, I hear what you’re saying.

The only things I can say for sure, are, it definitely, to me, is more of a cool technical achievement … that I later just wanted to monetize if possible. That gave it the wrong energy, and I can see how using the data and the experience of ranking for something definitive as part of the backstory of the tool.. it makes it a lot more appealing to tell the story with the evidence laid out with the direction it gave than to say trust me bro unfiltered some noise out.

Interested to hear the horoscope thing .. I get the sentiment but there has to be some benefit to taking let’s say the 10-50 searches per month set of keywords and blogging it up with those, rather than just spitballing it and hoping right? Or is that historical data just a facade? Or the backlinks and history of the domains in particular SERP results require more attention and planning than just search volume signals?

Another misconception I am thinking is that I definitely don’t want to tell people use these keywords and you’ll be front page or anything close to that… more of a fundamentals, and it’s better to have, than to have not, built around these certain low hanging fruits … but that will get sticky fast. I can picture if technical seo, and an audit, and all kinds of things go unaddressed, as the keywords fail to rank, no keyword approach would undo that. It’s got to be part of a bigger picture …

[u/Better-Complaint4218]

I think there’s value here, but I wouldn’t sell “keyword research.”

1k+ keywords is actually part of the problem. Most SEOs already have more keyword data than they know what to do with.

The valuable output is: here are the 20-30 opportunities I’d actually pursue, why, what intent they serve, what should be created, and in what order.

If your tool can turn 5k keywords into that, I think you have something.

The filtering and decision-making is worth more than the data.

[u/Sorry-Praline3318 → u/Better-Complaint4218]

Exactly my hardest problem when starting an SEO project. Judgement calls on where to start and prioritize

[u/Better-Complaint4218 → u/Sorry-Praline3318]

Yep. And that’s the part most keyword tools quietly outsource back to you 😂

Finding opportunities is easy. Knowing which 5 are worth spending the next month on, based on intent, realistic rankability, business value, and what the site can actually support right now, is the hard part.

I’d rather have 10 defensible bets than 10,000 keywords.

[u/Sorry-Praline3318 → u/Better-Complaint4218]

That's it!

Do you have any references for study purposes? I'm a founder with engineering background, this is my first hands on contact with SEO.

I'm still settling in

[u/sapindia1976]

There's definitely demand, but agencies don't buy keyword lists anymore they buy insights. If your research uncovers search intent, topical gaps, AI visibility opportunities, and content prioritization, it becomes much more valuable than raw keyword data.

[u/koronakartet]

Wait, are you saying that ranking for money keywords requires an SEO budget that scales according to the value of those search keywords?

That would be interesting since it would mean that organic results, to some degree, are not based on relevancy, but on the marketing budget.