How to Use Keyword Tools for Market Research: Questions, Search Interest, and Competing Content

To conduct market research with keyword tools, start by identifying questions your audience frequently asks. Then compare search volumes and advertising cost per click (CPC) for related terms, and review competitors’ content to find clues about demand worth investigating further. This information can help answer questions such as “What are people searching for?” and “Which questions keep coming up?” It does not directly measure buyer counts or market size. The information cited here is mainly useful for an initial look at search demand and competing content; it is not sufficient to estimate sales revenue.

Collect questions first, then find related terms

Do not stop your research after entering a product name. Neil Patel’s 2023 article recommends looking across platforms for recurring questions, organizing them into a list of topics, and then using keyword tools to find more related terms. The article also lists AnswerThePublic as a starting point for exploring the questions people ask in searches.

• Keep the original wording of questions: the way your audience phrases a question is itself a research clue.
• Organize topics: group similar questions together, then look for related keywords.
• Include different forms: examine questions, comparison terms, and short phrases rather than selecting only a single popular term.

For example, when researching a product category, you could organize “What is it?” questions separately from “How do these two products compare?” questions. This simply illustrates how to group questions; it does not mean that the available information establishes demand for a particular product.

As part of our services at Procrustes, we also turn the questions our clients genuinely care about into articles, with ongoing content planning, writing, and updates.

Distinguish between search volume and advertising metrics

A participant in the PTT discussion suggests starting market research by finding out roughly how many people search for a keyword. This is a participant’s suggestion, not an official rule. When compiling data, retain the metric names used by the tool rather than relabeling “search volume” as “number of unique searchers.”

Neil Patel’s 2023 article states that Ubersuggest offered search volume, CPC, and difficulty scores at the time. Listing these metrics for each related term can provide a starting point for comparison, but they should not all be treated as demand indicators. Search interest, advertising click costs, and ranking difficulty answer different questions. The sources cited here also provide no universally applicable thresholds for filtering keywords.

Use competitors’ content to supplement your question list

The same article by Neil Patel describes how to check which keywords competitors rank for and how to use popular content to find topic ideas. For market research, the point is not merely to copy headlines, but to identify which topics competitors cover and which questions merit further investigation.

For example, if your research list includes comparison questions, you can check whether competitors’ content addresses similar comparisons. Popular articles offer leads for content research; an article’s popularity alone does not establish that a product will sell well.

Use social media trends as a supplement, but note the time frame

awoo’s 2016 article recommends examining keyword groups before exploring individual terms in greater depth. The tool described at the time also provided related social media posts and trends over the preceding seven days to help analyze interest in topics and public sentiment.

You can follow this research sequence: start broadly, explore individual terms, and then compare what you find with the discussions themselves. However, the article describes features available at the time; it does not establish that the tool still offers the same services. Seven-day trends also reflect only short-term changes and cannot establish long-term market demand.