Keyword research builds the list your whole strategy runs on. We derive it from two directions at once:
- What your site already ranks for — live ranking data for your domain in your market, with volume, traffic, and position per keyword.
- What your site says it does — your homepage, headings, about page, and sitemap feed an AI pass that proposes the commercial keywords a business like yours should target, even where you rank nowhere yet.
Each keyword carries real search metrics: monthly volume, difficulty, cost per click, and intent →. Brand terms are excluded from the proposed set on purpose — you already own those.
Research runs inside the setup wizard for every new website, and again whenever you re-run discovery. Revisit it when the business adds a service or enters a new market — the keyword set is per market.
Review and confirm your keywords
To research keywords:
- Start the setup wizard → with your site.
- Review the proposed keywords on the pick-keywords step. Volumes and difficulty sit beside each.
- Confirm your selection. Confirmed keywords are what every downstream tool builds from.
Find more keywords later
Once a website is set up, its Keywords page has a Find keywords tab for new ideas at any time:
- Type up to five seed keywords, separated by commas or one per line (Shift+Enter starts a new line), and pick the market.
- To see a city or county's own volume, type its name under City or county and pick it from the list. This adds 1 credit to the search.
- Choose Search, or press Enter. Each seed costs 1 credit and returns up to 100 ideas with monthly volume, difficulty, cost per click, competition and intent.
- Filter by intent or sort by any column, tick the ideas worth targeting, and choose Add to targets. They join your Target keywords list with their figures.
A seed that finds nothing, or that the data service misses, is not charged, and neither is a city volume that does not load. Difficulty and intent are always for the whole country.
The search stays in the page address, so a reload keeps it and you can send the link to a teammate. Opening the link shows that search's ideas without running it again. If they are no longer saved, the form is filled in and nothing runs until you choose Search.
Treat the proposed list as a draft
The derivation reads what your site says about itself — so an offer your site never states will be missing. A studio that rents gowns but never writes the word "rental" gets no rental keywords proposed.
If customers search for something you offer but don't say, add the keyword yourself at the confirm step, then fix the site copy — the gap hides you from Google for the same reason.
Limits and usage
- Research spends live search-data credit per run. Results for a domain and market are cached briefly, so a wizard restart doesn't re-charge.
- Keyword metrics are per market. Changing the country changes volumes, difficulty, and often the keywords themselves.
- Ranking-derived keywords need the domain to actually rank; very new sites lean on the site-signal side until they do.
If something isn't working
The proposed keywords are off-topic. The usual cause is a thin or misleading homepage — the derivation had little to read. Add a sentence of business context in the wizard, which outranks every crawl signal.
Zero keyword data comes back. Check that the market matches where the site actually operates, and see why keyword data comes back empty →.