Strategy Library
The Keyword Research Strategy Library
Eight practitioner plays that treat keyword research as demand discovery, sourced from real interviews with working SEOs, executable inside OpenSEO.
How to do keyword research: demand discovery, not a volume spreadsheet
Most guides teach you to export a volume report and sort descending. These plays start earlier, where demand originates: customer language, question mining, your own Search Console. They end with pages mapped to intent, not keywords stuffed into paragraphs. Each play is a full walkthrough with the copy-paste MCP prompt that runs it.
Seed from conversation, not a volume report
Harvest seed keywords from sales calls and support tickets: the phrasings tools never surface.
What are long-tail keywords, and how to mine them
PAA fan-out, autocomplete harvesting, and the GSC queries you already half-rank for.
Search-intent mapping (hot / warm / cold)
Label every keyword by buying temperature before you write. Build the hot pages first.
Cluster keywords into topical hubs
One page per intent, one hub per topic, plus the fix for keyword cannibalization.
Programmatic discovery with Search Console
Query-mine your own GSC by MCP: striking-distance keywords, zero-click pages, dark queries.
Opportunity sizing & forecasting
Size a cluster before you invest: difficulty, traffic ceiling, and honest payback windows.
Intent beyond Google (Pinterest, AI, LinkedIn)
Where queries happen when they don't happen in a search box, AI assistants included.
Map positioning to real demand
Competitor keyword gaps as a positioning instrument, not a copying exercise.
What Google Keyword Planner hides (and what to use instead)
Keyword Planner is an ads tool wearing an SEO costume: it buckets close variants into one number, rounds volumes into bands, and hides everything with no ad demand. That's fine for bidding. It's blinding for content strategy.
The plays in this library replace it with three honest sources: your customers' language (play 01), Google's own question surfaces (play 02), and your Search Console reality (play 05). Volume data still matters, but it's the last filter, not the first.
Free keyword research tools for every play
Google's free surfaces (autocomplete, People Also Ask) plus your own Search Console do the discovery. Every play then runs in OpenSEO's keyword research, connected to your live Search Console. Open source, self-hostable, and scriptable through the MCP so your AI assistant can run the whole workflow. Quality SEO data is why the big suites run $100/month and up; OpenSEO starts at $10/month, and you can start for free.
Keyword research FAQ
How do you do keyword research for SEO?
Seed from customer language, expand into long-tails and questions, label by intent, cluster into one-page-per-intent hubs, then validate against Search Console. Volume is the final filter, not the starting point.
How do you do keyword research for free?
The discovery half runs on sources you already have: customer conversations, Google's autocomplete and People Also Ask, and your Search Console. Quality SEO data (volume, difficulty, live SERPs) is difficult to get, which is why SaaS tools run $100/month and up. OpenSEO is the most affordable option, starting at $10/month, and you can start for free.
Can you do keyword research without Google Keyword Planner?
Yes, and for SEO you should. Planner groups variants and hides zero-ad-demand queries. Use it to sanity-check commercial value, not to discover topics.
What are the 3 types of keywords?
By intent: informational, commercial/navigational, transactional. By shape: head, mid-tail, long-tail. The useful planning question is always intent first, shape second.
How do you do keyword research for a blog?
Blogs win in the tail: mine questions, cluster them into topical hubs, and let each post own one question-intent completely rather than skimming ten.
The Keyword Research Playbook
The plays as a working PDF: checklists, the MCP prompts, and the keyword-map template. Ungated.