Chapter 8: What Is a Keyword?

Last updated: November 1, 2026.

One of the concepts you’ll hear most often when people talk about SEO is:

Keywords.

But don’t assume from the name that it has to be a single word. A keyword can be one word, a phrase of a few words, or sometimes even a long question.

In its simplest form:

Keywords are the words or phrases people search for on Google and that we want to show up for.

For example, coffee can be a keyword; so can coffee machine, and so can best coffee machine. Even a long query like which coffee machine should I buy for home can be a keyword we target.

What I think matters here isn’t the length of the keyword.

It’s the person behind it.

Because when we do SEO, we’re not really targeting words, we’re targeting the people who use those words.

Are a keyword and a search query the same thing?

They’re very close concepts, but I find it useful to make a small distinction between them.

• Search query: What the user actually types into Google. For example, how to make filter coffee at home.
• Keyword: The word or group of words we target in our SEO work. For example, filter coffee.

So users can search in dozens of different ways, but we can group those searches under specific keyword groups.

People search for the same thing in different ways

That’s why in SEO it’s a big mistake to think only in terms of the words we use ourselves.

A company may call its product a “cordless upright vacuum.” But users may use different phrases such as:

• battery vacuum
• stick vacuum
• cordless vacuum
• best battery vacuum

This difference becomes even more noticeable for companies that work internationally. Let’s take a piece of spraying equipment used in agriculture. For the same or a very similar product, even within Turkey people may use different phrases like these:

• tarım ilaçlama makinesi (“agriculture spraying machine”)
• zirai ilaçlama makinesi (the same, with a more formal word for “agricultural”)
• tarımsal ilaçlama makinesi (“agricultural spraying machine”)
• ilaçlama makinesi (“spraying machine”)
• pülverizatör (“pulverizer”)
• atomizör (“atomizer”)
• ilaçlama ekipmanı (“spraying equipment”)

And when the business goes into global markets, things change even more. The same product may be searched for under different names in different countries, and even in different regions of the same country.

That’s why, when doing international SEO, translating the Turkish word directly into another language is often not enough. We need to find out which word people in the target country actually use to search for that product.

In other words, translation is one thing, keyword research is another.

What matters is less the name we give our product and more the name the user in the target market gives it. I think this is exactly where keyword research begins.

Should one page be built for one keyword?

Not always. For example, one of your pages may be built for coffee machine. But the same page can also show up for many related queries such as:

• coffee machines
• home coffee machine
• automatic coffee machine

Google no longer tries to understand what a page is about only through the words that appear on it word for word.

That’s why using the same keyword 30 times in your content isn’t SEO. In fact, most of the time you’ll just ruin the content.

What matters is that the page actually covers the topic and answers what the user is looking for.

How do we use the keyword on the page?

Google’s SEO Starter Guide says something quite simple on this: think about which words a user might search for to find your content, and write the text naturally.

The same guide has a few more important notes:

• Google’s language matching systems can understand how a page relates to queries that don’t appear on it word for word. So you don’t need to place every variation on the page one by one.
• Using the same words over and over tires the reader. Filling a page with keywords (keyword stuffing) is against Google’s spam policies.
• Google doesn’t use the meta keywords tag.
• It’s good for the URL to contain words that may be useful to the user. But words in the domain name or URL have almost no effect on their own.

In practice, having the main keyword appear naturally in the title, the main heading (H1) and the body text is a good enough start. I explain which page we assign the keywords we find to, and how, in Chapter 13.

Not every high-volume keyword is a good keyword

One of the mistakes people new to SEO usually make is this: they look at search volume. They find the most searched keyword. And they say “Let’s rank for this.”

For example, shoes may get a lot of searches. But we don’t know what the person searching for it wants.

Men’s shoes? Women’s shoes? Sneakers? Shoe repair? Shoe brands?

That’s why even if the search volume is high, it may not be the most valuable keyword for us commercially. Sometimes a much less searched phrase like men’s black running shoes can bring a user who is much closer to buying.

In my old SEO trainings, I used to explain it with Trendyol, Turkey’s largest online marketplace:

• trendyol
• trendyol integration
• woocommerce trendyol integration

As the search gets longer, the volume usually drops. But what the user wants becomes clearer.

It’s almost obvious what the person making the last search wants. They probably have an online store built on WooCommerce and are looking for a way to connect it to Trendyol. In my trainings I used to sum this up in one sentence:

The longer the search, the closer the person is to their goal.

Long-tail keywords

We usually divide keywords into three groups based on their length and how specific they are:

Each long-tail keyword has a low search volume. For some, tools don’t even show a volume. But that doesn’t mean nobody searches for them. People search for the same need with many different long phrases.

Even Search Console leaves some queries that are searched very rarely out of the query table, for privacy reasons. These searches are still included in the total clicks and impressions in the chart (Search Console Help). So you may never see some of the long searches that bring people to your site one by one.

We also shouldn’t take the word “long” literally here. What matters isn’t the number of words but how specific the search is. espresso machine is two words, but it describes a much narrower need than coffee machine.

What makes these keywords valuable is that the search intent is clear. We don’t know whether someone searching for coffee machine is looking at prices, wants a recommendation or is looking for a repair shop. Someone searching for automatic coffee machine with grinder for home, on the other hand, largely knows what they’re looking for and is closer to buying.

One of the best examples of why low-volume keywords can be valuable is the B2B client I described in the search volume chapter (Chapter 10). Their daily organic traffic is around 30-40 visitors, but they sell machines that cost about €20,000. It’s a business with low search volume, but when you rank for the right keywords, the rate at which visitors become customers is very high.

Long tail doesn’t always mean a purchase, either. how to clean a coffee machine is also a long-tail query, but the user is looking for information. That’s why with long-tail keywords, too, we need to look at the intent first before deciding.

Also, you don’t need to create a separate page for every long phrase. As we discussed above, a well-built page can answer many closely related long queries at the same time.

When choosing keywords, don’t think only about traffic

Let’s say we have two keywords. The first is searched 100,000 times a month. The second, 2,000 times.

At first glance, the keyword with 100,000 searches looks much more valuable. But if the second keyword:

• Is more relevant to our product
• Brings a user who is closer to buying
• Has lower competition
• Is a search we can really answer

then the 2,000-search keyword can be much more valuable for us.

That’s why I don’t look at a keyword only by asking “How many people search for it?” We also need to think about:

• Why are they searching?
• How relevant is it to our business?
• What do we expect from this user?
• Can we compete?
• Can we really build a good page for this search?

There’s the client’s language, and there’s the user’s language

This is another situation we run into often in SEO work.

The client tells us “We want to rank for this keyword.” The keyword may be a technical term used in the industry. Then we look at the research: people almost never search for that phrase. They search for the same product or service under a different name.

There’s no need to tell the client “The word you’re using is wrong.” The industry’s language and the user’s language can be different. One of SEO’s jobs is to build a bridge between the two.

I think the foundation of keyword research isn’t this question:

“What do we want to say?”

First we need to ask:

“How do people search for this?”

Then we match the product, service or content we offer with the user’s search in the right place.

I think this is where the real value of a keyword in SEO lies.

Practice

• What name do you give your main product or service? Look at Google’s autocomplete. What other names do users search for it with?
• Open the Performance report in Search Console. Do the queries that bring you traffic match the keywords you’re targeting?
• For each keyword you target, ask: Why is this person searching, and does my page answer them?
• Read the text of one of your important pages out loud. Is the same keyword repeated in an unnatural way?
• Find 3–5 long-tail phrases under your main keyword. Does your page answer them?

Previous: Chapter 7: Google Search Operators · Contents · Next: Chapter 9: How to Do Keyword Research

This chapter was first published in Turkish on X (September 5, 2026).