Keyword Research
How to use keyword suggestions and bulk search-volume lookups to find the terms your audience actually types.
Keyword Suggestions from a Seed
Give your AI employee a seed keyword and it will pull up to 100 related and long-tail variations, each annotated with monthly search volume, CPC (cost per click in Google Ads — a proxy for commercial intent), competition level (low/medium/high), and keyword difficulty (0-100, how hard it would be to rank). Results are sorted by search volume descending. This is the right tool when you are exploring a topic and want to see the phrasing your audience actually uses. "Marketing automation" the concept might be what you sell; "email marketing automation for small business" might be what your customers search.
Expanding a seed keyword
Find the long tail around a core term.
Bulk Search Volume Lookup
When you already have a list of keywords and just want the numbers, use the bulk search-volume lookup. It takes up to 100 keywords in one call and returns monthly volume, CPC, competition, and the last six months of month-over-month search volume (useful for spotting seasonal spikes). This is the tool when you have a draft keyword list from a brainstorm and want to quickly filter out the ones with zero real demand, or when a client sends you a spreadsheet of target terms and you want to sanity-check every one in a single pass.
Validating a brainstorm list
Check volumes across 20 candidate keywords at once.
Reading the Numbers
Search volume is monthly searches on Google in the specified location — a rough demand signal. Competition level is a Google Ads auction signal (low/medium/high); it reflects advertiser demand, not organic difficulty. CPC is the average cost per click in Google Ads — high CPC usually means commercial intent, which is what you want for bottom-of-funnel content. Keyword difficulty (0-100) is a more useful organic signal: under 40 is low-hanging fruit, 40-70 is effort, 70+ is usually not worth chasing unless you have strong domain authority already. The six-month history field catches seasonality — "christmas gifts for dad" has a November-December spike you want to plan around.
Picking Good Seed Keywords
Keyword suggestions are only as useful as the seed you give them. A too-generic seed ("business") returns a sea of irrelevant terms; a too-specific seed ("ClientCo blue widget model 7B") returns five results of little value. The right seeds are two- or three-word phrases that capture a topic cluster — "AI employee", "marketing automation for agencies", "shopify dropshipping supplier". Run suggestions on three or four seeds that cover different angles of your niche, union the results in your head, and that becomes your initial keyword universe.
Good rule of thumb: if you can picture the kind of article a seed would produce ("I could write a whole post titled X"), it's a good seed. If you can't, it's either too broad or too narrow.