The Best Keywords for SEO Are Different for Your Site Than for Mine

Last spring I watched a client burn four months of writing on a keyword their site could not have ranked for if they'd published the single best page on the internet about it. The term had 8,100 monthly searches and a difficulty score in the low 30s — "medium," green-adjacent, the kind of number that makes you feel safe. Page one was eight established domains with hundreds of referring domains each, plus a Reddit thread and a YouTube carousel. Two of the ten results were owned by the same publisher. There was no tenth slot in any meaningful sense. There was a wall.

That is the thing nobody tells you when you go looking for the best keywords for SEO: the phrase itself is incoherent. There is no list. A keyword is not good or bad in isolation — it's good or bad relative to the authority of the domain that's trying to rank for it. The best keyword for a DR 70 site with a decade of links is a catastrophic waste of time for a site that launched in March. Same word. Same volume. Completely different verdict.

Quick answer: what makes a keyword good for SEO? A keyword is good for SEO when three things line up: it matches a real intent you can serve better than what's currently ranking, it converts toward something you actually want (a signup, a sale, an email), and its page-one competition is beatable by a site with your current authority. Volume is the least important of the four inputs, and difficulty scores are a rough band, not a verdict.

Why "best keyword" lists are useless by construction

Every "top keywords for 2026" post shares a hidden assumption: that the reader's site is interchangeable with every other reader's site. It isn't.

Ranking is comparative. Google isn't grading your page against a rubric — it's picking ten results from a pool and ordering them. Your page doesn't need to be good. It needs to be better, for that query, than the tenth-best thing already there. "Better" includes the page itself, but it also includes everything Google knows about the domain the page sits on: how many other people link to it, how long it's existed, whether it has a track record of satisfying queries in this topic.

So the useful question is never "what are the best keywords for SEO." It's "what is the highest-value query where the weakest page-one result is one I can actually displace." That's a question about a specific site on a specific date, and it has a real, findable answer.

The keyword types, and what each one is actually for

Before you can find your ceiling you need to know what you're choosing between. Keywords aren't one substance in different sizes — the types behave differently, convert differently, and want different content formats.

Type	Example	Intent	Typical volume band	Typical difficulty	Format that wins
Head	seo	Undefined, mostly navigational	50k+	Brutal — usually reserved for brands and Wikipedia	Nothing you can write. Skip.
Body	keyword research	Learning, broad	2k–20k	High; needs domain-level authority	Deep pillar guide with original framework
Long-tail	how to find low competition keywords for a new blog	Specific problem, ready to act	50–800	Low to moderate	Focused tutorial with a repeatable process
Question	what is keyword difficulty	Definitional, often AI-answered	200–3k	Moderate, but SERP is crowded with snippets	Tight definition up top, then depth below it
Comparison	ahrefs vs semrush	Late-stage evaluation	500–10k	High — affiliates saturate these	Side-by-side table, opinion, real usage detail
"Best X for Y"	best keyword tool for local seo	Commercial, near-purchase	100–2k	Varies wildly by the Y	Ranked list with criteria stated up front

Two observations from that table that matter more than the table.

First, the "best X for Y" row is the highest-leverage category for most sites, and the reason is the Y. best keyword tool is a bloodbath. best keyword tool for a solo Shopify store under 100 products is nearly empty. The qualifier does two things at once: it collapses the competition and it sharpens the intent. Someone typing that qualifier knows exactly what they want and is very close to paying for it.

Second, question keywords have quietly changed jobs. They used to be traffic. Increasingly they're citations — the query gets answered in an AI overview or a chatbot response, the user never clicks, and your win is being the source that got quoted. That's a different game with different rules, and I'll come back to it.

Find your ceiling before you pick anything

Here's the method I actually use. It takes about forty minutes per site and it replaces every "best keywords" list you've ever bookmarked.

Step 1 — Find the queries you already rank 5–25 for. Open Search Console, filter to positions 5 through 25, last 90 days. These are queries where Google has already decided you're a plausible answer. This is your authority, measured empirically rather than guessed at. Sort by impressions.

Step 2 — Look at what those queries have in common. Not the words — the shape. Are they all long-tail how-tos? All comparison terms in one narrow subtopic? The pattern tells you where your domain currently has permission to compete.

Step 3 — Establish your displacement band. Take five of those position 5–25 queries and, for each, open page one and check the referring-domain counts of the results sitting just above you. If you're at position 8 and positions 5–7 have 20–40 referring domains each, that's your live band: you can currently reach pages backed by roughly 40 domains. Anything requiring 300 is out of range this quarter.

Step 4 — Now go keyword hunting, filtered by that band. Every candidate keyword gets one test: are there at least two page-one results within my displacement band? Not "is the difficulty score low" — are there actual, specific, beatable pages sitting there right now.

Step 5 — Re-measure in 90 days. Your band moves as you publish and earn links. The keyword that was out of range in January is often in range by June. Ceilings are not permanent; they're just current.

That's it. No list required. The method produces a keyword set that is correct for your site specifically, and it stays correct because you re-run it.

The difficulty score warning nobody wants to hear

This is the part I'd most want a beginner to internalize.

Published keyword difficulty scores — the 0–100 numbers in every tool — are bucketed estimates, and they are far coarser than their two-digit precision implies. A few things are true about them across essentially every tool on the market:

• They are overwhelmingly derived from backlink profiles of current page-one results, and little else. Content quality, freshness, brand strength, and search intent barely register.
• They are computed against a snapshot, sometimes weeks old. SERPs churn.
• The scale is non-linear and compressed at the top. The distance between 20 and 30 is not the distance between 70 and 80.
• Different tools give the same keyword wildly different scores, because each vendor's formula is proprietary and calibrated to their own index.
• A single anomalous result — one 20-year-old domain that happens to rank — can drag the whole score up or down by 15 points.

Treat any difficulty score as a band: "probably easy," "probably medium," "probably hard." Never as a number. The moment you find yourself comparing a KD 34 keyword to a KD 37 keyword, stop — you are reading noise as signal.

The verification step is non-negotiable and takes ninety seconds:

1. Open the SERP in an incognito window. Not the tool's cached version — the live one.
2. Read all ten results. Count how many are actually about your keyword versus loosely related.
3. Check for SERP features eating the clicks: AI overview, featured snippet, People Also Ask stack, video carousel, shopping block. A "low difficulty" keyword where an AI overview sits above everything may have almost no clicks left to win.
4. Look for weak spots — a thin forum post, an outdated 2019 article, a page that answers a different question, a result from a domain with no topical relevance.
5. Ask honestly: could I write something clearly better than result #7? If the answer isn't an easy yes, the keyword is not for you yet.

I have found KD 45 keywords that were trivially winnable because page one was junk, and KD 15 keywords that were impossible because Google had decided the query was navigational. The score told me neither. The SERP told me both.

If you want that inspection loop to run without forty browser tabs, and you want to see whether the terms you picked actually moved after you published, MisarSEO does the research and rank-tracking side of this. The important part is doing the check at all — do it manually if you prefer, just don't skip it.

Keyword targeting for AI answer engines is a different job

Everything above assumes you want a blue link. Increasingly, you want a citation instead — to be the source an AI overview, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude quotes when someone asks a question. That changes what a good keyword looks like.

The unit shifts from keyword to claim. Answer engines don't match strings; they retrieve passages that make a specific, checkable assertion. "Keyword difficulty scores are bucketed estimates derived mostly from backlink profiles" is a claim. "Everything you need to know about keyword difficulty" is not. Target claims.

Long-tail questions become more valuable, not less. They used to be low-volume consolation prizes. Now they're the exact shape of a conversational prompt. Someone asking an AI "how do I pick keywords for a brand new site with no backlinks" is running a query that has essentially no search volume in any tool — and enormous value if you're the page that gets cited.

Structure is retrieval. Write in extractable units: a direct answer in the first two or three sentences under each heading, then elaboration. Use a heading that restates the question. Put the numbers, the definitions, and the comparisons in tables and lists rather than burying them in prose. A model pulling context from your page will grab the clean, self-contained chunk every time.

Volume becomes almost irrelevant. For AEO, the question to ask is not "how many people search this" but "how many people will ask something semantically near this." A keyword with 40 searches a month can sit at the center of a cluster of thousands of conversational variants.

You cannot verify AEO the way you verify SEO. There's no rank tracker for "did Claude cite me." The practical proxies: ask the major engines your target questions directly and see who they name, watch for referral traffic from the AI assistants that pass a referrer, and monitor brand-name search volume, which tends to rise when you're being mentioned in answers you can't see.

The good news is that AEO-friendly writing and genuinely useful writing are almost the same thing. Specific claims, clear structure, real numbers, no filler. The optimization and the quality point in the same direction, which is not something you could always say about SEO.

What I'd do with a brand new site tomorrow

Concretely, if I started a site today with zero authority:

• Pick one narrow topic and stay in it for six months. Topical depth is the only authority signal you can manufacture without links.
• Target exclusively long-tail and "best X for Y" keywords where the Y is a specific, small audience.
• Ignore volume entirely below the 500/month mark — at that scale the difference between 60 and 300 searches is rounding error compared to whether you can rank at all.
• Write the one page on the internet that fully answers a question everyone else answers partially. That's the only reliable way to beat a stronger domain.
• Re-run the ceiling method every quarter and move up as the band allows.

None of that requires knowing "the best keywords for SEO." It requires knowing your own site.

FAQ

What are the best keywords for SEO for a new website?

Long-tail keywords with clear intent and at least two beatable page-one results — typically 4+ word phrases with 50–800 monthly searches, and "best X for Y" terms where Y is a narrow qualifier. The specific words depend entirely on your topic and current authority, which is why no published list will be right for you. Run the displacement-band method above and generate your own.

How many keywords should one page target?

One primary keyword and its close variants, which in practice means one page per intent, not one page per phrase. If two keywords would be answered by the same page, they belong on the same page. If they'd need different answers, split them. Google is good enough at semantics now that a well-written page naturally ranks for dozens of related terms without you stuffing them in.

Is keyword difficulty score reliable?

As a rough band, yes. As a precise number, no. Difficulty scores are computed mostly from the backlink profiles of current page-one results, are calculated on stale snapshots, and vary substantially between tools for the same keyword. Use them to sort candidates into easy/medium/hard piles, then verify by opening the live SERP and judging whether the actual pages are beatable.

Does keyword research still matter with AI search?

Yes, but the object changes. You're researching the questions people ask and the claims that answer them, rather than exact-match strings with volume attached. Conversational, long-tail, low-volume queries have gone from marginal to central, because they're the shape of an actual prompt. The research habit stays; the target moves from ranking to being cited.