Keyword Research and Content Planning
You will be tested on turning raw keyword data into a prioritized content plan: judging search intent, assessing difficulty honestly, mapping one primary keyword to one URL, and sequencing production so early wins fund later ones.
Intent first, volume second
Every query carries intent - informational, navigational, commercial, transactional - and the SERP is the ground truth for it. Before you weigh volume, read the top ten results. If they are listicles, a product page will not rank there; if they are category pages, an explainer will not. Match format as well as topic.
Qualifying a keyword
- Relevance to a page you can legitimately build.
- Volume, with seasonality and trend direction noted.
- Difficulty, judged by the authority of the ranking domains and not by one score alone.
- SERP features: featured snippets, video, local packs, and shopping units take clicks even when you rank.
- Business value: a 200-search bottom-funnel term can out-earn a 20,000-search informational one.
Mapping, not listing
Build a sheet with one row per URL and one primary keyword per row. Add a secondary keyword only if the same content would satisfy that searcher. Two pages targeting one query cannibalize each other; the fix is consolidation with a 301, not rewriting both.
Worked example
A B2B CRM sees "crm software" at 40,000 monthly searches with a difficulty score of 85, and "crm for real estate teams" at 900 searches with difficulty 22 and clear commercial intent. The plan starts with five vertical landing pages, real estate among them, because they convert and are winnable. The pillar page for "crm software" is built in the background and supported by internal links from those vertical pages, which are already earning authority.
Traps
Choosing keywords by volume alone. Ignoring that the SERP is owned by a format you cannot produce. Writing a new post for every near-duplicate phrase. Planning content with no owner, deadline, or success metric. Skipping a content audit and republishing topics you already cover.