Seed keywords + expansion

Keyword research starts with seed keywords, the 5-15 terms that describe your business, product, or topic area. From those seeds, you expand into hundreds or thousands of keyword candidates.

Generating good seed keywords

The right seeds come from four sources:

1. Your products/services, what you sell, in plain language
2. Customer language, what actual customers call it (often different from how you describe it)
3. Jobs-to-be-done, the problem your product solves
4. Category terms, the broader market you operate in

Example

For an insurance agency CRM:

• Product: "insurance CRM," "agency management software"
• Customer language: "insurance agent tool," "producer tracking"
• JTBD: "follow up with insurance leads," "track insurance policies"
• Category: "sales software," "agency software"

That's 8 seeds. Good starting set.

Expansion methods

1. Tool expansion

Plug each seed into Ahrefs/SEMrush/Keyword Planner. Pull:

• Matching keywords (contains seed)
• Related keywords (semantic relatives)
• Questions (queries phrased as questions)
• Top 3 autocomplete suggestions for each

2. People Also Ask scraping

Search each seed, note the PAA questions. Each PAA question is a potential target.

3. "Related searches"

At the bottom of every SERP, Google shows related searches. Add them to the pool.

4. Competitor expansion

Take your 3-5 biggest SEO competitors. Export their top-500 ranking keywords. Merge into your list.

5. Forum + community mining

Reddit, Quora, specialized forums. Search for your seeds. Note the language customers actually use, often very different from marketing copy.

6. Customer + support data

Internal goldmine. What do customers ask your support team? What do they type into your site's search? Mine this.

How big should the expanded list be?

For a new project: 500-2,000 candidates is normal. Before clustering + filtering. After clustering, you'll have 50-200 target clusters.

The "too broad" trap

Tools return lots of technically-related queries that are wrong for your business. "Insurance" pulls back hundreds of life insurance consumer queries when you're B2B. Filter aggressively on intent + audience fit before clustering.

Workflow

1. List 5-15 seeds
2. Expand each via tools
3. Merge all sources into one spreadsheet
4. Dedupe
5. Filter by relevance (manual pass, painful but necessary)
6. Add volume, difficulty, intent
7. Cluster
8. Prioritize