Keyword Research: From a List of Queries to a Map of Your Pages

How to collect keywords, tell buying intent from research intent, group them into clusters and turn them into a page plan — step by step, using a cosmetics and fragrance store

Keyword research is how you find the searches people use to look for your products or services. Done properly, it doesn’t end with a list of keywords — it ends with a keyword map: which page on your site answers which query, and why.

Without that map, a website grows at random. The team writes blog posts because “we need a blog”, adds pages because competitors have them, and a year later the owner sees that traffic hasn’t moved and some pages are competing with each other for the same searches. Google’s own documentation lists this as a warning sign: producing lots of content on many different topics in the hope that some of it performs well in search.

This article walks through how to collect keywords, read search intent, group queries into clusters and turn them into a page plan — step by step, using a cosmetics and fragrance online store as the example.

In short

What is keyword research, and why does a business need a keyword map?

Keyword research gives you a map of demand: what people type when they look for what you sell, and where on your site they should find the answer. For a business it solves three problems — it shows what demand actually exists, it prevents pages from competing with each other, and it gives you a clear plan of what to build first.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide recommends thinking about the words people might search for to find your content — some search for “charcuterie”, others for “cheese board”. It also says you don’t need to anticipate every variation: Google’s language matching systems understand how a page relates to many queries even without the exact words. So the goal of a keyword map isn’t to squeeze in every phrasing, but to understand intents and distribute them across pages.

What a keyword map gives you in practice:

• Priorities. You can see which pages will bring buyers now and which will bring readers later.
• Structure. Each keyword cluster gets its own page, so pages stop competing with each other.
• A content plan. Instead of “what should we write about?”, a list of topics with a clear place on the site.
• A way to measure results. After 3–6 months you can check which clusters grew and which didn’t.

How to do keyword research: where do keywords come from?

Keyword research starts not with a tool but with four sources, each showing its own slice of demand. Tools give you volume, Search Console shows what already works, and customers and Google’s results show what no database contains.

How to do keyword research step by step:

1. List your core topics — products, services, categories, customer problems. For a cosmetics store: “perfume”, “serums”, “sunscreen”, “skincare for acne-prone skin”.
2. Expand each topic with tools and Search Console: each core topic produces hundreds of variations.
3. Add customer questions — what people ask in messages and mention in reviews.
4. Clean the list: remove duplicates, products you don’t sell and brand names you don’t stock.
5. Tag each keyword with volume, difficulty and intent — covered in the next section.

Keyword analysis: volume, difficulty or intent — what matters most?

Keyword analysis usually starts with volume, but the deciding factor is intent: what the person wants to do when they type the query. A keyword with 50 searches a month and buying intent can bring more orders than one with 2,000 searches and reading intent.

• Volume — how often the keyword is searched per month. It shows the scale of demand, not its quality.
• Difficulty — how strong the sites already ranking are. For a young site, high-difficulty keywords mean a year of work, not a month.
• Intent — informational (learn), commercial (compare and choose), transactional (buy). Intent decides which page should answer: a category, a product page or an article.

The quickest way to check intent is to open Google’s results for the keyword. If store categories fill the top results, Google treats the intent as commercial; if guides and how-tos do, it’s informational. Writing an article for a keyword where Google shows product listings is one of the most common reasons a page never grows.

Keyword clustering: one page, one intent

Keyword clustering means grouping the keywords one page can answer. The working rule is simple: if Google shows mostly the same pages in the top 10 for two keywords, they belong to one cluster. If the results differ, the intents differ, and each needs its own page.

For example, “women’s perfume” and “perfume for women” almost always share results — one cluster, one category. But “women’s perfume” and “how to choose a perfume for autumn” are different intents: one is about choosing from a catalogue, the other about advice, so they need a category and an article.

You can cluster manually by comparing results, or with automatic clustering tools. For a few hundred keywords you’ll still need to check edge cases by hand: a tool doesn’t know which products you stock and which you don’t.

A keyword research example: a cosmetics and fragrance online store

A cosmetics and fragrance online store: around 1,200 products, a blog with 40 articles published over a year, and organic traffic of 2,100 visitors a month that had barely moved. The articles picked up impressions for random searches, while the categories lost to competitors. Here’s how the keyword research went.

Collection. 210 keywords came from Search Console, 330 from Ahrefs, 60 from customer questions in messages and reviews, and 40 from autocomplete and “People also ask” — 640 in total. After cleaning (duplicates, brands not stocked, irrelevant queries) 470 remained.

Clusters. The 470 keywords formed 52 clusters: 31 commercial (categories and subcategories) and 21 informational (choosing, skincare routines, comparisons).

The key finding: there was clear demand for niche perfume and for perfumes with specific notes, but no pages for it. Those searches were scattered across the general “Perfume” category, where people couldn’t find what they were looking for.

What tools miss: content gaps and zero-volume keywords

Tools show what’s in their databases, not all of the demand. Zero search volume in Ahrefs doesn’t mean nobody searches for it: for new, niche and conversational phrasing there’s often simply no data. That’s why some of the most valuable keywords come not from tools but from conversations with customers.

In the same cosmetics store, customers kept asking “what to put on after a chemical peel”, “can you use retinol in summer” and “which affordable perfume smells like popular niche scents”. Tools showed zero or near-zero volume for this wording, yet it came up in chats every week. These questions became the articles that sent buyers to the categories.

• Messages, reviews and calls — note the questions that come up at least once a week.
• Search Console — queries with impressions that aren’t in your keyword map yet: Google already connects your site with them.
• Google’s results — “People also ask” and related searches under your main keywords.
• Your product range — categories where you have stock but no keyword in your map: a signal to check demand manually.

A separate case is another country. Keyword research for the UK and the US shouldn’t be copied: British shoppers search for “moisturiser”, American ones for “moisturizer”, and the same product can sit under different everyday names. Each market needs its own research.

From keyword research to a keyword map and a publishing plan

Keyword research becomes useful once it turns into a keyword map: a table where each cluster has one page, an intent, a priority and a month. That table then drives both your site structure and your content plan.

The prioritization rules we follow:

1. Buying-intent clusters first — categories and service pages. They bring orders first.
2. Then pages already ranking in positions 8–30 — the cheapest to move up.
3. Informational articles as support for commercial clusters, linking to the relevant category or service.
4. Every new page must get indexed — otherwise it doesn’t exist for search. Check it with URL Inspection in Search Console after publishing.

A keyword map isn’t a one-off job. We review it every quarter: add new queries from Search Console, drop what’s no longer relevant and check for pages that have started competing with each other. Once a cluster is assigned to a page, the next step is the title tag and description for that query — covered in “Meta Tags: Why Your Page Shows Up in Google but Gets No Clicks”.

Frequently asked questions

Eight questions about keyword research we hear most often.

What to do next

Start small: open Search Console, list 30 queries your site already appears for and check whether each has its own page. That list alone will show where pages compete with each other and where demand goes unanswered.

A keyword list answers “what do people search for?”. A keyword map answers the question that matters more: “where on your site will they find it?”.

— Iryna Lehusha, founder of Be Visible

Sources

Principles for working with search queries come from Google’s official documentation.

1. Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide
2. Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content