8 Most Important Types of Keywords for SEO (And How to Find Them)

Seed keywords are words or phrases that you can use as the starting point in a keyword research process to unlock more keywords. 

If lucrative keywords are the output of keyword research, seed keywords are the input. 

There are a lot of ways you can come up with good seed keywords:

And more. 

Let’s do a quick example. Say you want to start a food blog. You come to a competitor’s blog to look for ideas, and you find a recipe for “vegan meatballs.” You can write a similar recipe or use that as a seed keyword to find out if people search for any variations of the dish. Here are a few you’ll find in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. 

In our other resources, you will find more great seed keyword sources with detailed instructions:

Roughly speaking, we can differentiate four basic types of intent keywords: 

On top of that, we’ve got so-called high-intent keywords that indicate the user is close to making a purchase; commercial investigation and transactional keywords combined.

You can use modifier words. Here are a few ideas:

In Keywords Explorer, it's even simpler. You can just use the built-in search intent filters.

Long-tail keywords are search queries that get a small number of searches per month.

They’ve got their name from the so-called search demand curve. For any topic, the most popular searches are the short-tails (also called the fat heads or the head terms), followed by the middle, and lastly the long-tails. 

Targeting long-tail keywords is a common tactic in SEO: 

There are two types of long-tail keywords. 

There are topical long-tail keywords, which are topics in themselves. And there are supporting long-tail keywords, which are less popular ways of searching for the topical ones. 

It’s an important difference because it only makes sense to target topical long-tail keywords. Here’s an easy way to memorize it: think of them as sets and subsets. 

So here’s how to find topical long-tail keywords in Keywords Explorer: 

Low-competition keywords, or low-hanging keywords, are the keywords that are typically easier to rank for. 

Their claim to fame is that they can give faster results in the short term, so they are often recommended to new websites without a strong link profile. 

The easiest way to find low-competition keywords is to use an SEO tool featuring a difficulty score. At Ahrefs, we simply call it Keyword Difficulty (KD). 

This method will filter out keywords that are dominated by pages with a lot of backlinks. However, there is still a possibility that some of the keywords with low KD will be tougher to rank because of:

You can further refine that list by using the “Lowest DR” filter by inputting your site’s DR. This will show you if websites with your DR or lower already rank in the top 10 or top five. 

A special kind of low-competition keywords are newly trending keywords. You can find them before your competition does by sorting results by Growth Rate (choose form 3-12 month period) and limiting the keyword difficulty to something not too hard, say "30". Finally look at the search volume graph to double check a steady growth trajectory.

There are different modes of this filter that allow you do dive even deeper:

Niche keywords are clear and specific topics that appeal to relatively small, often specialized parts of a given market. 

They tend to be easier to rank for. And because of their specificity, they can be high-intent ones. In other words, each niche keyword can send you small but highly qualified traffic in a short time. Put together, they can be a pillar of a long-tail business (selling low volumes of rare items). 

Example keyword: “vegan baby soap.” It’s got a low search volume, but it’s very specific. And this product is probably quite rare. So there’s a high chance that the searcher will be in the market for such a product. Plus, it should be quite easy to rank for. 

Niche keywords are similar to long-tail keywords. However, niche keywords are not only about search demand. There’s a market aspect to it, so you’ll need to spend more time researching the actual thing the keyword stands for.  

For example, this keyword has traffic potential but doesn’t denote an existing product. It’s a misspelling.

To solve this, you can use a couple of ideas for refining your keyword list. Here’s an example: 

And this is how we discover a niche for consumers who don’t want their soap to have a fragrance.

Ranking for non-branded keywords allows you to attract people who are searching for products or services related to your business but may not necessarily know your brand. 

Ranking for branded keywords allows you to attract people who are specifically searching for information about your company.

To illustrate the difference:

Simply use the intents filter in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. It works for branded and unbranded keywords. 

Who wouldn’t want to see their competitors' keywords? Among many reasons, those keywords are a goldmine of topics for your own site. 

When you know a competitor’s keywords, you can:

There are two ways. 

First, you can go to Site Explorer, paste your competitor’s URL, and go to the Organic keywords report. 

From there, you can use filters to refine the keywords list. For example, low-competition keywords or keywords containing specific words. 

You can also view the competitors’ keywords where you don’t rank. Ahrefs' Competitive Analysis tool will find them for you in a few clicks 

The primary keyword is the main topic of a page. It’s also the single keyword to optimize a page for or, in other words, the reason to do keyword research in the first place. 

Secondary keywords are keywords closely related to the primary keyword that you’re targeting with your page.

To illustrate, if the primary keyword is the title of the book, you can use secondary keywords as subtopics. 

To find good primary keywords, you need to do proper keyword research. Your primary keywords should:

See our full guide on keyword research to learn all the details. 

Finding secondary keywords depends on your primary keywords (as these are related). You can use the Related terms report in Keywords Explorer.

Those are the eight important types of keywords. Here are a few types that are just worth knowing:  

If you're an Ahrefs user, make sure to check out the Presets section to uncover even more keyword types, including:

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