How can you use tools to research and track keywords?

Using tools to research and track keywords involves four steps: define your website’s goals, collect the language your audience uses, filter keywords by search volume and intent, and compare changes in rankings and traffic against your optimization records. The point is not to find the keywords with the highest search volume, but to identify needs your website can address. Tracking should also go beyond rankings: monitor impressions, clicks, and organic traffic to decide what to investigate next.

Set goals first, then expand your keyword list

Before opening a tool, clarify whether you want your content to help readers learn about a topic, compare options, or make a purchase. Start with your website’s topics and existing search queries, and use research tools to find related terms. Then add phrases your audience actually uses in forums, Q&A discussions, and customer reviews. At Procrustes, we turn the questions our clients genuinely care about into articles, with ongoing content planning, writing, and updates.

You can also expand short phrases into more specific questions. For example, “email marketing tools” could become “Which email marketing tools suit small businesses already using an e-commerce platform?” This simply illustrates how to articulate audience needs; it is not a verified popular query. If a generative tool suggests candidate keywords, their search volume and ranking difficulty still need to be checked separately.

Filter by three criteria, and understand what competition means

• Search volume: Understand the scale of demand, but do not choose topics based on numbers alone.
• Search intent and relevance to your website: Determine whether readers want answers, comparisons, or a way to take action, and whether your website can provide suitable content.
• Organic search difficulty: Assess the competition; do not assume that low advertising competition means it will be easy to rank organically.

When you see “competition,” first check how the tool defines it. For example, the advertising keyword tool discussed in the referenced Q&A measures competition among advertisers bidding for ads, not how easy it is to outrank top-ranking pages. You can also look for keywords that competing websites rank for but yours does not, and use them as starting points for choosing topics. However, a tool’s organic traffic estimates should not be treated as a competitor’s actual traffic.

Keep tracking data alongside the dates of your changes

Once you have finalized your keyword list, start tracking your target keywords’ rankings and record what you changed and when. Document edits such as revising titles or adding comparisons so you can compare them with changes in rankings and organic traffic. This is especially helpful for beginners assessing their approach, but a ranking increase after an edit does not, by itself, establish that the edit caused it.

Investigate ranking declines and traffic declines separately

• Rankings decline: Compare current search results with your own page and check whether your content still meets searchers’ needs.
• Rankings remain stable but traffic declines: Start with impressions and clicks, then check search demand, how your page appears in the results, and whether the search results page has changed. There is no need to rewrite the content immediately.

If you analyze exported files, refresh the data before each analysis to avoid using outdated data to assess new changes. These checks can help narrow down the problem, but they do not establish what caused the changes.