How to Do Keyword Research in Semrush: An 8-Step Workflow

Four tools, four different questions

Keyword research in Semrush runs through four tools, and each one answers a different question. Keyword Overview judges one keyword or a batch of 100, the Keyword Magic Tool finds related terms, Keyword Gap compares you with up to five competitors, and Keyword Strategy Builder turns the result into pages. Each has its own daily limits. This guide takes them in a practical order (screen, expand, compare, mine your own rankings, then organize) and uses Semrush's help center and pricing pages, read from the US on 12 October 2026.

Before you start: one country, one plan

You need an account, a domain and a country database before the first search, and since every metric is calculated per country, pick the market you sell to first. A free account opens every tool, but with 10 reports a day across all of them ^[1]. That is one short session. A paid plan lifts the Keyword Magic Tool to 3,000 reports a day on the Pro tier and 10,000 on Business ^[2]. The cheapest paid route is the SEO plan at US$139 a month, or US$117.33 a month on annual billing. Starter costs US$199 and adds AI prompt tracking, but keyword research itself is the same on both. For keyword research alone, pay for SEO.

Step 1: Screen every keyword in Keyword Overview

Type a keyword into Keyword Overview and Semrush returns its volume at national, global and local level, its intent, the number of results, CPC, competition and a 12-month trend. The help center calls it the easiest place to start. Treat it as a filter: a term with no volume, the wrong intent or a crowded first page goes no further. Volume is the average monthly number of Google searches in the chosen location, and Global Volume adds up every country database. CPC is what advertisers pay per click. Competitive Density runs from 0 to 1.00 and measures how many advertisers bid on the term, and Semrush notes that this paid metric can also hint at a keyword's organic value.

Keyword Difficulty, and the version that is about you

Keyword Difficulty is an industry-wide estimate of how hard it is to reach Google's top 10. Personal Keyword Difficulty, or PKD, does the same for one domain, weighing how closely your site's topics match the keyword, the competition in that topic and the domains already ranking. Semrush calculates it with large language models that map how far each topic sits from your domain's core subjects. PKD is not on the free plan. Semrush splits it into six bands, and the bands describe the work required:

• Very hard, 85 to 100%: heavy link building and promotion.
• Hard, 70 to 84%.
• Difficult, 50 to 69%.
• Possible, 30 to 49%.
• Easy, 15 to 29%.
• Very easy, 0 to 14%: a new page has a real chance.

Intent decides the page type

Every keyword carries one of four intents: informational, navigational, commercial or transactional. A machine-learning model assigns it from three signals: the SERP features shown, words that reveal intent such as buy or how, and whether the keyword is branded. Match the page type to it. A how-to guide will struggle on a transactional keyword, however strong the page. If the first page is full of product listings and shopping results, a long informational article is unlikely to break in, and the same holds the other way round for guides.

Trend, local and bulk checks

The trend chart shows 12 monthly bars, and the last bar is always the previous month. A flat line means year-round demand. A spike means a season, and Semrush's own example is a swimwear term that peaks in spring and summer, so publish a few months before the peak because pages need time to rank. Keyword Overview can also show volume, difficulty, CPC, intent and SERP data for a city or region instead of a whole country. Two limits apply: it works for single keywords only, and every new location counts against your monthly keyword metrics updates. PKD and other domain-based metrics are missing at local level.

The Bulk Analysis tab takes up to 100 keywords at once and returns the same core metrics for each, which makes it the fastest way to prune a list you built elsewhere. Bulk metrics are always current, while historical data comes one keyword at a time, and only on the Guru and Business tiers.

Step 2: Grow the list in the Keyword Magic Tool

The Keyword Magic Tool starts from one seed keyword and returns every related term in its database. A popular seed can return millions of rows, so this is where a list grows, and you should expect to discard most of it. Four match types narrow the results. Broad Match returns the seed in any form and order, Phrase Match keeps the seed's exact form though the order may change, and Exact Match keeps form and order. Related returns terms that are semantically close and may not contain the seed at all. Start broad. Then tighten.

Questions and keyword groups

The Questions button keeps only keywords phrased as questions, the raw material for guides, FAQs and comparison pages; the help center's examples are how to, what is the difference between and where do I find queries. Groups appear in a sidebar, sorted by keyword count or total volume, and go up to three levels deep. Semrush's example starts from snowboard, opens a boots group, then size, then men. Above the table, Total Volume and Average Difficulty update for the group you open. High total volume with low average difficulty marks the best groups.

Filters that do most of the work

You can filter by volume, Keyword Difficulty, intent, CPC, included or excluded words, language, word count, SERP features and competitive density, several at once. Two combinations do most of the work. KD below 50 with the right intent finds realistic targets. A word count above four finds the long tail, which Semrush defines as less popular but more specific searches, often easier to rank for; its example is "very small inground pools" against "swimming pools". The SERP feature filter finds keywords that trigger AI Overviews, People Also Ask boxes, local packs or video results, while None returns keywords with plain results only, which the help center says may be easier to compete on.

Related terms and results for your own domain

The Related view lists terms connected by meaning, with a Related % that measures how close each one is to the seed, and Semrush suggests them for building topical authority before chasing harder terms. Enter your domain in the AI-powered filter bar and the tool adds PKD and Potential Traffic for each row. A toggle shows only keywords where your site already ranks in Google's top 100. Those are improvements, not new pages. Both AI metrics are paid.

Step 3: Borrow keywords from competitors

Semrush's own workflow starts with competitors rather than seeds. Enter your domain in Organic Rankings, open the Competitors tab and choose up to four sites with common keywords. Then open each competitor's Positions report, which lists every keyword where it ranks in Google's top 100; for a brand-new site, use an established site in your niche instead. Sort each list by volume, remove branded keywords and drop anything too difficult for your domain. The help center then suggests 5 to 10 keywords to start with. Thousands at once are impossible to optimize for.

Keyword Gap and its seven intersections

Keyword Gap compares the keyword profiles of up to five domains side by side. You can compare organic, paid or Google Shopping keywords, and even mix them. The report shows a Top Opportunities widget, a keyword overlap chart and a full table, split into seven intersections:

• Shared: every domain ranks.
• Missing: all competitors rank, you do not.
• Weak: you rank below every competitor.
• Strong: you rank above all of them.
• Untapped: at least one competitor ranks, you do not.
• Unique: only you rank.
• All keywords: the lot combined.

Missing and Weak are the to-do list. A position filter from 11 to 20 lists keywords where you sit on page two, close to page one. The intent filter compares rivals on one intent at a time, and the KD filter uses the same six levels as the rest of Semrush. Comparing specific URLs, subfolders or subdomains instead of whole domains needs the Guru or Business tier.

Step 4: Your own second page is the cheapest source

In Organic Rankings, filter your own positions from 11 to 20. These keywords already rank reasonably well, and Semrush calls moving them into the top 10 a quick win. Pick 5 to 10 and optimize the pages you have rather than writing new ones. For a page at position 14, a better title, a clearer answer near the top and two or three internal links will usually do more than a brand-new article.

The Position Changes tab adds a second source: keywords where your rankings fell or vanished. Filter for declined and lost keywords, sort by the traffic they used to bring, and take another 5 to 10, because recovering an old ranking is often faster than earning a new one. To connect keywords to URLs, add your list to a Position Tracking campaign, whose Pages report shows which of your URLs already rank for each keyword, and prioritize pages with high total volume but a low average position. Then export the keyword and page pairs as a CSV and upload them to On Page SEO Checker, which compares each page with the top 10 results.

Step 5: Organize everything in Keyword Strategy Builder

Keyword Strategy Builder, formerly Keyword Manager, collects keywords from every other tool. It can analyze up to 10,000 keywords and group them into topics, pillar pages and subpages ^[3], fed from Keyword Overview, the Keyword Magic Tool, Keyword Gap, Organic Rankings or a CSV of up to 2,000 keywords. Start from up to five seed keywords and it builds a structured list on its own. Import keywords instead and you get a regular list that you organize yourself, which the Cluster this list button can group later. Pages are ranked by relevance, volume, difficulty, domain diversity and SERP features.

Presets, sharing and the limits that bite

Four presets shape the result. Best for Strategy balances relevance, difficulty and volume, Easy Start shows low-difficulty keywords with decent volume for newer domains, Quick Conversions keeps commercial and transactional intent, and More Potential Traffic shows the highest volumes. A new site should start with Easy Start. Lists can be shared with Viewer or Editor access, but free users cannot share lists at all, and when someone you shared with refreshes metrics, the refresh counts against your limit.

Every account can store 200,000 keywords in total, and deleting lists does not free that capacity. Clustering or structuring a list counts as one action: 10 a month on Pro, 30 on Guru and 50 on Business, and none without the SEO toolkit. Metric refreshes run at 250, 1,000 and 5,000 a month on the same tiers. On Pro, ten clustered lists a month is the real ceiling.

Step 6: Track what you chose

Position Tracking updates daily, and Semrush keeps daily points for 60 days, then weekly points. Add a note in the campaign each time you change a page. New keywords need up to an hour before volume and CPC appear. Rankings take longer. Expect weeks, not days. Our Semrush Position Tracking guide goes further into the campaign itself.

What free, the trial and paid plans allow

The table comes from the Keyword Magic Tool help page, which still uses the old tier names: Starter inherits Pro's limits, Pro+ inherits Guru's and Advanced inherits Business's. Keyword Overview and Keyword Gap share the same daily request limits. A free account gives 10 Keyword Magic Tool reports a day and 10 results per report, with nothing to export. Export, metric updates, PKD and Potential Traffic are all paid, and without the SEO toolkit Keyword Strategy Builder offers no clustering and no metric refreshes. Free works for checking a handful of terms. It cannot build a list.

The 7-day trial opens the tools with paid limits, but exporting data is disabled during every trial ^[4]. Your research stays inside Semrush until you pay, so if you test keyword research during a trial, copy keywords into Keyword Strategy Builder lists, which survive the upgrade. Once you pay, Keyword Overview, the Keyword Magic Tool and Keyword Strategy Builder export as XLSX or CSV, and Keyword Gap exports up to 50,000 rows and also exports to PDF.

When the numbers look wrong

Semrush's keyword database is larger than its domain database, so some keywords show metrics but no SERP. The fix is Update metrics, which refreshes difficulty, intent, SERP features and the SERP in about five minutes, and it needs a paid SEO toolkit. Zero and n/a also mean different things. A volume of 0 means fewer than 10 average monthly searches in that location, while n/a means Semrush lacked enough clickstream data to calculate it. A CPC of 0 means under one cent or no ads; n/a means no evidence of bidding yet. For a local campaign, try a larger location before deciding a keyword is dead.

Semrush says a study it ran showed its search volume was the most accurate among well-known competitors, which is a vendor study about its own product. Treat volume as a ranking signal rather than a forecast. Two keywords with 1,000 and 2,000 searches are probably ordered correctly, but the exact traffic you will get is another matter.

Mistakes to avoid, and a weekly routine

Three mistakes recur. The first is chasing volume without checking intent. The second is ignoring PKD, which exists to show which keywords your own domain can win. The third is building a list during a trial and losing it, because exports are off. A fourth is quieter: teams forget the 10 clustering actions a month on Pro. Once the list exists, the routine is short. Check Position Tracking for drops, run the second-page filter in Organic Rankings, and review Keyword Gap after any competitor launch. Twenty minutes a week covers it.

The bottom line

Semrush's keyword tools are deep, and the order matters: screen in Keyword Overview, expand in the Keyword Magic Tool, borrow from competitors and Keyword Gap, mine your own second page, then build a structured list. The personalized difficulty score is the most useful addition of recent years, if your domain has some history. Budget for the paid SEO plan, because the free plan and the export-free trial will not get you a usable list. For the plan-by-plan math, read our Semrush pricing guide.