How to Build a Keyword Strategy That Gets Results

This article covers how you can transform your keyword list into a well-planned strategy that’s geared toward achieving your SEO goals.

What is a keyword strategy (and how is it different from keyword research)? 

Keyword research is the process of finding popular search terms. Typically, you’d use a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer or free keyword generator and get hundreds of keyword ideas related to your topic.

Keyword strategy, on the other hand, decides which of these keywords matter for your site, at your current stage of growth, and in which order they should be prioritized.

Think of it as the decision-making layer that sits on top of research.

Without a keyword strategy, you end up with an overwhelming list of potential search terms to target and no sense of priority. With it, you know exactly what to work on next and why.

Your SEO goal shapes your entire keyword strategy 

Before you touch a keyword list, get clear on what you’re actually optimizing for. The right strategy looks very different depending on your goal:

• Rankings: Prioritize topical coverage, ownership of branded search results, and closing competitor gaps. Keywords are chosen for positioning and your ability to rank well, not necessarily conversion.
• Traffic: Prioritize terms with high traffic potential, or high search volume and low competition, to drive higher click-through rates. In a traffic-building strategy, you may accept lower commercial intent in exchange for reach.
• Revenue: Prioritize transactional and bottom-of-funnel keywords. Such a strategy targets fewer terms but with higher value per visit. This is also where paid data becomes most useful, since cost-per-click signals tell you which keywords actually convert.
• Authority: Prioritize broad topical coverage and branded search results. The goal is to become the go-to resource in your space for your topic, a foundation that strengthens every other goal on this list.

Once you know what goal you’re aiming for with your keyword strategy, here’s how to start building it.

Step 1: Find keywords with genuine traffic potential 

When building a keyword strategy, your initial instinct is likely to sort by search volume and work down the list, adding the highest-volume keywords first. Resist it.

Search volume tells you how many people search for a term each month, but it doesn’t tell you how much traffic you’d actually get by ranking for it.

For instance, the keyword “freelancing tips” has 1 million searches a month in the US, but only gets about 200 clicks. Looking at the search results, we can see that’s likely because there’s an AI Overview at the top, followed by a Reddit thread and a post on Medium (which has very high authority).

It would be quite difficult for a newer or smaller brand to get traffic from such a keyword, despite it being searched for millions of times each year.

Meanwhile, there are many other keywords on the same topic of freelancing that have a higher ratio of traffic potential (TP) to search volume (SV):

Some even have more traffic potential than search volume because they belong to a cluster of keywords that, when combined and targeted in a piece of content, can deliver significant traffic.

Step 2: Analyze what’s already working for competitors 

Another approach is to reverse-engineer competitors who are a few steps ahead of you.

Enter each competitor’s domain in Ahrefs Site Explorer, and navigate to the Top Pages report.

Here you’ll find their highest-traffic pages, and can reverse-engineer what’s driving visits to them. You’ll often discover keyword opportunities you’d never have thought to search for directly.

The goal at this stage is to filter a long list of keywords about your topic based on those that have a realistic chance of sending meaningful traffic, not just terms that look impressive in a spreadsheet.

Step 3: Score each keyword’s business potential 

Each keyword your potential customers search for has value for your business. But some have more value than others.

Take these three keywords about computer components, for example:

• “graphics card” – Searchers are shopping around or looking for more information. They’re nowhere near ready to buy.
• “b550 vs x570 motherboard” – Searchers have done some shopping around and narrowed down their options. They’re almost ready to buy.
• “amd ryzen 5 3600” – Searchers have decided what they want. They’re ready to buy.

Given that some of these searchers are closer to buying a computer part than others, some keywords arguably have more “business potential” for a computer parts store. You’ll need to apply a similar thought process to find the search terms you should prioritize in your keyword strategy.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet for scoring the “business potential” of your keywords:

Just keep in mind that the way you score a keyword may differ from how someone else scores it.

It depends on how valuable it is for your business. For example, if you don’t sell the “AMD Ryzen 5 3600,” that keyword has a “business potential” score of 0 for you, not 3.

Step 4: Assess ranking difficulty realistically 

Keywords vary in ranking difficulty for a number of reasons. This doesn’t mean you should avoid those that are harder to rank for than others, but it’s important to take ranking difficulty into account when building your keyword strategy.

Here are the main things we recommend you look at to assess ranking difficulty:

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top ranking factors. The more high-quality backlinks the current top-ranking pages have, the harder it’ll be to compete with them.

For a rough idea of how many backlinks you’ll need to crack the top 10 positions on Google, check the Keyword Difficulty (KD) score in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. This is based on the number of links to the top-ranking pages.

For a more thorough assessment, scroll to the SERP overview and check the “Domains” column to see the number of linking websites to each page.

Just keep in mind that these numbers only tell you the quantity of links to each page. To understand link quality, you’ll have to review each page’s backlink profile. You can get to this by clicking on the number in the “Backlinks” column.

Authority

Many SEOs believe that popular websites rank more easily on Google. For that reason, most take a website authority metric like Domain Rating (DR) into account when assessing a keyword’s ranking difficulty.

Google representatives have said many times that Google doesn’t evaluate a site’s authority. But there are a few ways site authority can indirectly affect rankings.

• Internal links – High-authority sites tend to have more high-authority pages, and internal links from those pages may help other pages to rank higher.
• Familiar brands – Searchers likely want to see household names for some queries. If that’s not you, you may have a harder time ranking.
• siteAuthority signal — A siteAuthority attribute was found in Google’s 2024 Content Warehouse API leak, stored in the same module used in primary scoring. Google cautioned against firm conclusions, but its presence there is hard to ignore.

If you are in the camp that thinks Google takes site authority into account or just want to err on the safe side, check the top-ranking pages’ DR scores in Keywords Explorer. If they’re all much higher than your site’s DR, you may want to prioritize other keywords.

Quality

If the top-ranking pages for your keyword are high quality, it’ll take more time and effort to compete.

For example, the folks ranking #1 for “best air purifier” tested 47 air purifiers over eight years to make their recommendation. It’s going to cost an awful lot of time, effort, and money to compete on content quality.

Compare this to the top results for many other queries that have no background information on how recommendations were chosen. It’ll likely be much easier to beat these on content quality than the former.

Based on your assessment of the attributes above (backlinks, authority, and quality), you can give keywords a “ranking potential” score like so:

Step 5: Map keywords to search intent and content type 

These days, knowing a keyword has traffic potential and business value still may not be enough. If the content you create doesn’t match what searchers actually want, you won’t rank, regardless of how good the potential is.

The most reliable way to figure out search intent is to look at what’s already ranking. Google has essentially done the research for you: the top results tell you what format and angle searchers expect.

For example, people searching for “backlink checker” are clearly looking for a free tool. We know this because all of the top-ranking results are free tools.

If the results for your keyword aren’t quite so clear, you can also try out our AI keyword intent analyzer available in Keywords Explorer:

To stand virtually any chance of ranking for this keyword, you’ll need to create a free tool. Unless you have a backlink database like ours, that will be almost impossible.

You can also analyze the following to assess whether your content can meet a keyword’s intent or not.

• Content type: Are the top results blog posts, product pages, landing pages, or tools? A keyword like “backlink checker” is dominated by free tools. You can’t write your way around that.
• Content format: Are they listicles, how-to guides, comparisons, definitions? “How to do keyword research” calls for a step-by-step guide. “Best project management software” calls for a ranked list.
• Content angle: Is there a dominant hook across the results? “Easy,” “for beginners,” “in 2025”. These signal what the audience cares about most.

It’s also worth considering the queries people search on AI platforms like ChatGPT, AI Mode, and Perplexity. Many of these platforms use a technique called query fan-out, which expands one keyword into a cluster of related searches that add more context to the user’s search and intent.

These fan-out queries anticipate a searcher’s follow-up question and actions. They can provide great insight into what to include in your content to capture that “next step”.

A page that only answers the surface question may get cited once; a page that addresses the surrounding questions becomes a reference point. Mapping intent well means thinking about what your reader will want to know next, not just what they searched for.

Step 6: Group keywords into priority topic clusters 

Targeting keywords in isolation is inefficient. A single page, if it covers a topic well, will naturally rank for dozens of related terms, not just the one you optimized for.

For example, this page on Healthline’s website ranks for over 2,500 related keywords on Google and many more in AI search platforms:

This performance is due to topic clustering, the practice of grouping related keywords into a single content piece to cover a topic comprehensively, rather than targeting each keyword in separate pieces of content.

It’s also how our Traffic Potential metric works. It estimates traffic based on all the keywords for which a top-ranking page appears, not just one.

In practice, this means identifying a head term (say, “email marketing”) and mapping out all the supporting topics around it. You can easily do this using the Cluster by Parent Topic feature in Keywords Explorer, where you can see the traffic potential across the whole cluster or for the parent topic:

To also make your keyword clusters AI-friendly, you can use Brand Radar to find relevant query fan-outs.

Content that targets each cluster builds authority in the broader topic, and that authority flows back to help your site rank for more competitive terms.

This is also where query fan-outs become a practical tool. When building a cluster, ask: what questions would an AI system explore to fully answer the head term? Those fan-out questions are often exactly the supporting content gaps you should be filling.

You can check out AI Content Helper to help you unpack search intent…

… and to find sub-topics to cover in your content:

You can also add fan-out queries to see what sub-topics they relate to that you can include in your content.

Cover a topic thoroughly, using traditional keywords and query fan-outs, and you’re more likely to show up in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers.

Step 7: Building your keyword strategy (bringing it together) 

When you have many keywords and clusters competing for limited time and resources, you need to think strategically about what gets prioritized.

• Prioritize first: Clusters with high business potential and rankability. There’s a strong commercial fit and a realistic path to ranking.
• Long-term bet: High business potential with low rankability (right now). These are opportunities worth building towards as your authority grows.
• Traffic play: High rankability with low business potential. Target these only if the intent is a good fit, but don’t overinvest. Good for reach and building authority in moderation. Too much and you start to attract the wrong audience altogether.
• Deprioritize: Low business potential and low rankability. These will not deliver a decent return on investment, and efforts spent on these clusters may never deliver results in competitive search results.

Work on your immediate priorities and a handful of long-term bets in tandem. Immediate priorities lead to quick wins. Long-term bets require supporting content built out gradually so you’re positioned to compete later.

When prioritizing keywords, it’s not about their individual metrics, such as traffic potential and search volume. You’ve already filtered out any that won’t bring in traffic in the earlier steps of this process.

Rather, it’s about your ability to rank for them. That’s dependent on your site’s current situation and authority level.

You can’t earn a high level of authority overnight, so be patient.

Show up each day and do your SEO reps (create content, build links to it), and over time, you’ll start to earn more authority for each topic cluster you’ve been expanding.

Step 8: Build a tracking and iteration system 

The difference between a keyword project and a keyword strategy is what happens after you publish.

Rankings shift. New competitors emerge. Content that was comprehensive six months ago may have gaps today. A strategy that isn’t regularly revisited quickly becomes a list of things you did once.

At a minimum, track your target keywords over time in a tool like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker to see what’s moving and what isn’t.

You can also track traffic earned from organic and AI search in Web Analytics:

When a page isn’t gaining traction after a few months, the first question to ask is whether you targeted the correct keyword to begin with. Check that before you blindly make content edits.

Revisit your strategy quarterly. As your domain authority grows, terms that were previously out of reach become realistic targets. The keywords you start with shouldn’t be the same ones you’re chasing a year in.

How keyword strategy needs to adapt to AI search 

AI Overviews and AI-powered answer engines are changing which keywords are worth targeting and what it means to be visible for them.

For many informational queries, 58% of clicks that used to go to the top organic results are now absorbed by AI-generated answers.

If your SEO goal is to build visibility and brand authority, it may still make sense to target these keywords so you can show up in AI responses and traditional organic results.

You can also track your performance and visibility using Ahrefs’ Brand Radar:

Where close competitors are mentioned and cited in AI responses, and you’re not, that’s a gap in your keyword strategy that you’ll need to close.

However, if your goal is to attract people who are likely to click on your site with the intent to buy something, then you’re better off targeting keywords with a higher traffic potential and fewer AI features in the search results.

You can filter out keywords with AI Overviews in Ahrefs using the SERP features filter:

The right keywords for your brand depend on your goals and current situation. There’s no right or wrong way to go about this.

Final thoughts

A keyword strategy isn’t something you build once and file away. It’s a framework for making better decisions (about what to create, what to improve, and what to leave alone) that compounds over time as your site grows.

The steps here give you that framework:

• Find keywords with real traffic potential
• Score them for business value
• Assess what you can realistically rank for
• Match your content to what searchers actually want
• Build out topics systematically
• Keep revisiting as things change

Start with a small, focused list of priority keywords. Get those right. Then expand.