A keyword with 10,000 monthly searches is worthless if the people searching it want something your page does not offer. Good keyword research starts with intent and uses volume only as a tiebreaker.
The four intents
- Informational: “what is canonical tag”, “how to fix crawl errors”.
- Commercial investigation: “best rank tracker”, “SEO audit tool comparison”.
- Transactional: “buy”, “pricing”, “hire SEO consultant”.
- Navigational: a brand or product name.
Read the results page, not the tool
Search the keyword yourself. If the top results are all guides, a product page will struggle. If they are all category pages, a blog post will struggle. The results page is the clearest statement of what Google believes the intent is.
A simple scoring method
- Collect candidate keywords from your tool of choice and from Search Console queries.
- Group them into topics so one page targets one cluster, not one keyword.
- Label each cluster with its dominant intent.
- Score business value: how close is the searcher to a decision?
- Estimate difficulty by looking at who ranks, not by a single difficulty number.
- Only then compare volume.
Use what you already have
Search Console shows queries you already almost rank for. Pages sitting at positions 8 to 20 are often the fastest wins: improve the answer, the title and the internal links before writing anything new.
Intent-first research gives you fewer, better pages, and those pages are the ones that bring customers rather than just traffic.