Keyword research for a small Irish business, with Google's own tools

Start with a list, not a tool. Google's SEO Starter Guide asks you to think about the words a user might search for to find your content, and points out that someone who knows a subject well may use different words from someone new to it: its example is "charcuterie" against "cheese board".

Write one line for each thing you sell, in the words a customer would use on the phone to you, and add the problems that send them looking. Google's advice for Keyword Planner is the same: describe how your customers think of your product or service, and be specific without being too specific. Its examples are "wedding venue" over "wedding", and over "wedding venues for small weddings".

Search Console, which Google describes as a free service, is the place to start, because its figures are searches that have already shown your pages. Open the Performance report and choose the Queries tab. Google gives four figures for each search: clicks, impressions (how often your site appeared in results), click-through rate, and average position. The default view covers the past three months.

Add a filter for Country and choose Ireland, so the list is the searches made here. Then sort by impressions. Google's own suggested use is to look for queries with high impressions and a low click-through rate, as a chance to improve the page's title and description. A low click-through rate, Google says, can mean searchers see the page in the results but do not think it answers their question.

If the site is not in Search Console yet, or a page you expected is missing, why a site is not on Google goes through the checks in order.

The Performance report has a filter for branded and non-branded queries: searches that include your business name, and searches that do not. Google describes non-branded searches as often more general, and says non-branded traffic can indicate new audience growth. That second list is the one keyword research is for.

Google says the filter is not available for sites with a low number of impressions. On a small site, read down the query list and set the searches containing your name aside by hand.

Keyword Planner is a tool inside a Google Ads account. Google's help says you must enter your billing information to complete the account set-up before keyword suggestions open, and its sign-up guide gives the option to create an account without a campaign. Researching in the planner runs no ad.

In the planner, set the location to Ireland and the language to English before anything else. Then use Discover new keywords, starting either with your list or with a website: Google says you can enter any website and it will look for keywords related to the content on that site. Get search volume and forecasts takes a list you already have.

Each search comes with an average monthly searches figure. Google defines it as the number of times a keyword and its close variants were searched, averaged over 12 months by default, for the location you chose. The figures are rounded, and they are shown for exact matches only, whichever match type you pick.

When we read the planner for Ireland on 29 October 2026, "keyword research" averaged 1,000 searches a month, but one of the twelve months behind that average showed 170 and another 2,400. An average can hide a season. The planner's date range setting shows search volume for the months you choose, and Google Trends, in the next step, shows the shape.

Google Trends does not give search counts. Google's description is that each data point is divided by the total searches in its place and time, then scaled from 0 to 100 by its share of all searches, so the figures compare interest and say nothing about how many searches there were. Set the location to Ireland at the top of the page.

Compare your candidate phrases side by side: Google says the Explore page takes up to eight groups of terms at a time. Below the chart, the related searches show top searches made in the same session and rising ones, and "Breakout" means a search grew by more than 5000%.

Read small searches with care. Google says Trends shows terms with low volume as 0, and adds small random fluctuations to protect privacy, most noticeable on queries with little search interest. Its advice is that one-off spikes on those should not be read as real search activity.

Give each question its own page, and write that page in the words you found. Google's starter guide says anticipating the different words searchers use and writing with readers in mind could help how a site performs, and also that you need not cover every variation, because its language matching can relate a page to searches that do not use the exact terms.

It is just as clear about what does not help. Excessively repeating the same words is keyword stuffing, against Google's spam policies; Google Search does not use the keywords meta tag; and its guidance on helpful content says it has no preferred word count. That page lists warning signs of content made for search engines first, among them producing lots of content on many different topics in the hope that some of it performs, and writing about something only because it seems to be trending.

For a search that shows your page and earns few clicks, Search Console's advice is to update the page's title and description to represent the content better, or to align the content with the searches that show it. That is where the list from Step 1 is put to work.

None of these tools says where a page will rank, and nobody can promise a position. Keyword Planner shows how many searches there were, Trends shows when and in which direction, and Search Console shows what your own site is already shown for. Together they tell you which words to write a page in.

The planner also shows what advertisers paid to appear at the top of the page for each search, which is a separate question: what Google Ads costs in Ireland explains those columns.