What Are Three Key Considerations When Evaluating Keywords for Search Engine Optimisation?

It is not the same skill to find a keyword and select the right keyword. In less than a minute, you can have a spreadsheet of fifty search terms related to a topic in any free tool you want. That part is easy. The next step in determining whether your content will rank or not is deciding which of those fifty words would be worth a page on your site and which ones won’t be worth it.

That’s the essence of the question: What are three key considerations when evaluating keywords for search engine optimisation? This is not inquiring how to search for keywords. How to evaluate them after you have them. Most SEOs will use 3 criteria to answer: Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, and Search Intent. The same concept is also taught as relevance, frequency and competition. Both are right, and as we go we will tie both together so it doesn’t feel like there is a contradiction, but rather two views of the same decision.

We’ll discuss each pillar in turn below but not give you a list of definitions to cram into your head next time you’re sitting down to plan content, but the sort of practical detail you can apply the next time you have to create content.

Finding Keywords vs. Evaluating Them

This is something to think about for a while, as many newbies stumble here. The brainstorming phase is finding keywords. A suggestion tool for free, Google’s autocomplete feature or a simple request of an AI assistant will give you several dozen phrases that are related to what you are typing. This filtering process comes after keywords are evaluated, reducing that big list of keywords to a few that are worth targeting with content creation.

If you’ve done any background research on this issue, you may have previously heard “three factors” and “four factors.” This is where the confusion has arisen. Some courses are specifically teaching relevance, volume (how often a term is searched), and how difficult it is to rank on the term (how much competition it has). Others teach volume, difficulty, and the intent, which is the framing we’ll use here. A keyword may or may not be relevant to your page, and relevance and intent are more or less the same thing. One can’t be relevant without having that intent, and the opposite is not necessarily the case either. Competition and difficulty are basically the same thing, but under different names. If you know them all correctly, you’ll be able to give your answer in any way a course or a client or a job interview asks you to give it. Once that’s taken care of, let’s take a closer look at each one.

Search Volume: How Many People Are Actually Searching This?

The number of times that a particular keyword is searched per month is called search volume. It’s typically the first thing that people look at because it’s the question that everyone wants to ask, which is, if I put it in the rank, will anybody be able to see it?

Imagine you have two concepts for an article to post on a small design blog. The “free logo maker” term is a very popular term with a high search volume and is likely to attract significant attention. The phrase “Best logo tool with a cartoon cat icon” may only be searched by virtually nobody. Volume informs you immediately which of the two ideas has some merit and which is a dud from the get-go.

Here lies the rub: high volume and easy ranking seldom go hand-in-hand. The keywords with the highest number attached typically are ones that all the other competitors in your niche are already targeting, making it an immediate trip to the difficulty problem that follows. This is how many new sites write content for the sole purpose of having volume with no consideration of the cost of ranking it, and then end up failing to get it past the fourth page of Google.

One more consistent strategy is to not judge by volume alone, but as a sorting mechanism. Create a list of possible keywords for your topic, and then find those that fall somewhere between too few and too many monthly searches, meaning they’re worth your effort without being saturated by sites that have been around for 10 years. If your site is newer, then the middle range is a few hundred to a couple thousand instead of tens of thousands. The bigger the numbers you can go after, the more authority your site will have over time.

You’ll require a keyword research tool to get these numbers. Despite the great majority of these having added AI functionality atop the same underlying content, the core list remains largely unchanged.

• Google Keyword Planner is free, but by far the easiest route to Google’s own search data, especially when it comes to ad campaigns.
• Ubersuggest is cheap but decent in terms of volume, related keywords and ease of difficulty
• Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer is a paid tool that provides detailed volume and trend data for keywords, along with AI-powered intent labeling.
• Semrush Keyword Magic Tool (paid) is built into one of the largest keyword databases available and the clustering feature is built-in
• Moz Keyword Explorer Paid is famous for its priority score, which combines volume and difficulty in one.

All of these tools are not always perfectly aligned, as they draw data from various sources and perform rounding in a variety of ways. If the monthly numbers seem different between Ubersuggest and Ahrefs, don’t worry about the decimal point, the overall size and the trend are what’s important.

Long-Tail Keywords are still effective for most websites

If there is one habit to get into, it’s targeting long-tail phrases as opposed to short, catch-all phrases. Shoes are short, wide and cutthroat. The words ‘best running shoes for flat feet’ are longer, much more specific and will tell you who’s looking, and why.

The main benefit of using long-tail terms is that they typically have less search volume, but there are two ways to compensate for that. They’re much easier to rank for because not many sites bother targeting the exact phrase. And the person who’s trying to find a long tail term is usually more likely to know exactly what they’re trying to find, and so that’ll convert more even with fewer overall visitors. A ten of the right visitors performing well is better than a thousand visitors performing poorly.

One good way to do this is to structure your article or page around a single long-tail phrase and let the remainder of the article flow with similar shorter phrases. Creating a page directed at the keyword “best running shoes for flat feet” can lead to ranking for “running shoes flat feet” and other variants as long as the topic is covered well.

KW Difficulty: Is It Worth the Competition?

Also known as keyword difficulty, or KD, is a metric that determines the likelihood of being able to get on the first page of Google for a specific keyword. It’s the one metric that maintains search volume honestly. Even the best of keywords can be a complete waste of your time if the rest of the top two spots on page one are already taken by Wikipedia, a government website or a brand that has been active for 10 years and has backlinks from many different websites.

This is calculated slightly differently for each of the major tools. The KD number, which ranges from 0 to 100, is provided by Ahrefs. Ubersuggest provides an easy, medium, or hard ranking. Semrush has its own score based on percentages. They’re all asking the same question, but they’re measuring different inputs: In reality, where are you going to stand a chance?

Today, one will often get tips such as “stay below a KD of 30, which is valid, but without context. A web domain that has solid authority, a robust backlink structure, and has been continually published for several years can easily rank for keywords in the 40s and 50s. A completely new site with no backlink history whatsoever will often be better off, starting with a lower score, say less than 20, even if a tool’s overall advice is to keep it lower than 30. Difficulty is not a static number that is applicable to everyone, but rather a relative measure based on your own site’s authority.

This is why it is more important than the score alone to have a manual check. Do your own search and check who the top 10 are. When there are a variety of independent blogs, smaller business blogs, and blog content that is about the size you can produce, it is a really great opportunity. If each result is a major website, .gov website, or a publication with thousands of links pointing to it, then there’s no difficulty score that will alter the result that the keyword is not winnable yet, regardless of the score it gets in the tool.

As you’re perusing that top ten, here are a few other signs to check out: how fresh the pages are (if content at the top is old, it’s an opening), how well the content covers the topic (if the content is thin, it’s an opening), and whether anyone is clearly under-optimised for that specific term, which would be evident if they are missing it completely from the title or headings. These gaps can be more easily won than just the difficulty score indicated.

Search Intent: What is the Searcher looking for?

This one is the one that most beginners will miss and it is the subtler to sink in content than a bad volume, or difficulty call ever would be. Having a keyword with high volume but low difficulty doesn’t necessarily mean that you will attract any traffic if the content you’re offering is not what the person searching for is looking for.

Try to buy running shoes online. You have not written a thoughtfully done post about how to pick the appropriate pair, you are already looking for a place to buy, not a buying guide. Google has learned this as well, and that’s why a well-crafted but wrongly-targeted page is unlikely to rank higher than a simple product page on a query like that.

While there are many beginner guides that list the three main types of intent, SEO typically maintains the fourth, and has a quiet way of omitting the second one:

• Informational: the person wants to learn something, such as how to clean suede shoes
• Navigational: a person wants to visit a particular website or brand (e.g., Nike running shoes website)
• Commercial investigation: looking around, someone is not quite sure yet before making a decision, such as “best running shoes for flat feet” or “Nike vs Brooks running shoes”
• Transactional: the person is now ready to act, for example, “buy Brooks Ghost 16 size 9”.

The third category is commercial investigation, which is usually the most overlooked category and is expensive. There’s a ton of valuable traffic that resides in that “still comparing, not quite ready to buy” space, in posts in which people compare, review roundups, and “best of” lists. Treat it as normal information-based or ignore it altogether and you are missing one of the most commercially useful types of keywords.

Then, how to determine whether the keyword belongs to one of the categories? There are two methods and it’s good to use them together. The words themselves suggest: “how,” “what,” and “why” are information oriented, brand names are navigation oriented, “best,” “top,” “review,” and “vs” are commercial investigation oriented, “buy,” “price,” “discount,” and “near me” are transactional. To be more accurate, you’ll want to check the rank of the content that’s already ranking. If the top ten on Google is full of how-to guides and explainers, it doesn’t matter what keyword you have in mind, it’s an informational keyword. If it’s a lot of comparison posts or review roundups, then it’s a commercial investigation and a plain old how-to won’t take the place of it. The search results are the most telling answer key that you can find.

One interesting fact as we move into 2026: AI-generated answers are increasingly serving a larger percentage of queries that are purely informational, all on the search results page, before a searcher has a chance of clicking through to a website. I don’t think informational keywords are bad, just whether it is worth getting the first rank on a keyword or just whether it is too simple to understand and people will just come in based on the summary alone. Commercial investigation and transactional keywords have much better click through value when people really want to investigate the real option or take some action.

Relevance Ties All Three Together

Where the two question formats overlap is with responses that read relevance, frequency, and competition rather than volume, difficulty, and intent. But under all three lies the question of relevance: Does this keyword belong to the concept of your business, page or brand?

A keyword may have good volume, low competition, and be very relevant, but not if it’s not relevant to you. Let’s say you have a company that makes invoicing software, and they decide to go with “how to calculate sales tax by hand. Its purpose is clearly information and lots of people search it, but most of them are doing manual bookkeeping simply because they don’t have software yet, so few will ever get converted to a customer. The aim of the game was a perfect match with what was played. That particular business’s relevance was not.

The short test of relevance: Would you take the next step and discuss your product/service/skills with someone if they would come to your page from this keyword? The answer is probably “not really.” If the genuine response is “not really,” regardless of the level of difficulty or volume, the keyword should not be on your content calendar.

A Simple Process for Evaluating Any Keyword

Combine all these and an evaluation process becomes rather repeatable. This blog post outlines a typical and probable scenario.

Use a seed topic, a topic that you know your audience has an interest in or a topic that is closely related to what you are selling. Feed that seed into a keyword tool to get more keywords, and be concerned with quantity now, as you’ll have to filter hardcore in the coming steps.

From this raw list, look at search volume and eliminate anything that has so little demand that it wouldn’t be worth pursuingl however, keep in mind the long tail exception: If the phrase is very specific and relevant, then a low number of searches doesn’t automatically mean it isn’t worth going for. After that, based on the difficulty of your site, and not a generic site, rule out anything that is obviously too hard to tackle just yet. If it clears both filters, perform manual searches and analyze the results page to ensure your goal and to identify any opportunities that the current top ranking content may be missing. Lastly, perform the relevance check in the section above.

Once all four checks are done, if a keyword still appears good, it is a real possibility to write about. Another good habit to develop after your first few articles: create a group of keyword candidates around a single article instead of creating a new, thin article for each slight modification of a keyword. “Best running shoes for flat feet” “running shoes for flat feet” and “running shoe recommendations for flat feet” are three different variations of the same query and should be on the same page, if necessary. You don’t have to rank for every combination of them, but at least one well-built page can realistically rank for all of them, and you don’t have to compete against yourself, a problem that can occur even more often than people think with sites that have more than a few dozen pages.

Why Getting This Right Is Worth the Extra Time

The keyword you select before you start writing a single word will be the most leveraged part of the entire process, as SEO content takes time to research, write and publish. Do it correctly and you’ll find you’re ranking steadily up the ladder, getting organic traffic that is interested in what you provide, and your content will continue to work for you months or years after it’s published. If you get it wrong, even the best writing can be on page 6 and out of sight for those who need it more.

This isn’t something that needs a huge budget for an agency or years of SEO experience. It’s about checking the volume you don’t want to write to a void, checking if it’s difficult or not otherwise you wouldn’t want to be picking fights with no point, checking the intent to make sure you’re actually writing to what the person searching for actually wanted, and checking the relevance because if it is not worth the traffic in the first place, then you are wasting time. Apply those four tests to each keyword before you even start typing the content, and you’ll save so much time that you are wasting on content that didn’t really have a shot at it.

Final Thoughts

So, what are three important factors that you should take into account when assessing keywords for your search engine optimisation? Search volume, keyword difficulty, and search intent, all of which have relevance beneath them to ensure that you stick to what your site is trying to accomplish. The skill is the same: judging keywords and not just collecting them, whatever the text you’ve heard or seen this taught with is. This isn’t something that an SEO expert can do alone. Follow these checks every time you create a new blog post, landing page, product description, or even a YouTube title and keyword research will no longer be a guess-thing.

If you’re in the process of developing the next step in your SEO plan, then you should read our guide to Competitive Gap Analysis, which outlines how you can find out what topics your competitors have been exploring that you haven’t. If you’re following this up with backlinks, then check out our article about link exchange SEO as well. But when you get stuck, Tech Trick Solutions is here to help you along with some simple how-to’s, step-by-step.