M6.L2 · Search & SEO
Keyword & topic research on a €0 budget
What you'll be able to doConduct keyword and topic research using only free sources, producing 30 prioritised keywords organised into 5 topic clusters.
Learn
The subscription you don't need yet
Professional SEO suites cost €100+ a month. At your stage they mostly tell you, with more decimal places, things free sources already reveal. When search drives real revenue, buy one. Until then, the €0 toolkit plus one asset nobody sells will produce a better keyword plan than a paid tool in a beginner's hands.
That asset is sitting in your Module 2 folder, and we'll come to it.
Four intents, because intent decides everything
Every query carries an intent, and intent decides what kind of page can win and what winning is worth:
- Informational — learning. "are handmade ceramics dishwasher safe"
- Commercial — comparing before choosing. "stoneware vs porcelain plates"
- Transactional — buying, booking, contacting. "handmade dinner set buy"
- Navigational — finding you specifically. "ostara ceramics reviews"
You saw in Lesson 6.1 what happens to each on the results page: informational increasingly ends in a generated answer; commercial and transactional still click. A keyword plan that's 90% informational is a plan to be read and never paid.
Clusters, not keywords
Modern search understands topics, so you plan in topic clusters: a group of related queries answered by one strong page plus supporting pieces. "stoneware vs porcelain plates", "is stoneware or porcelain more durable" and "porcelain vs stoneware for everyday use" are not three keywords — they're one cluster, one page, one job. Five clusters is the target today, because five is enough to cover a small business's whole search territory and few enough to actually build.
This is entity and topic optimisation in practice. The obsolete alternative — one thin page per keyword variation — now just produces a site full of near-duplicates competing with each other.
The long tail is where small sites win
"handmade ceramics" is a head term: huge volume, dominated by marketplaces and magazines. "handmade ceramic wedding gift ideas" is a tail term: modest volume, weak competition, and a searcher far closer to a decision. Small sites win tails first, heads later or never — and that's fine, because tails convert better anyway.
A corollary the tools get wrong: zero search volume is not zero value. Hyper-specific queries that show "no data" in volume tools are asked by real people — and increasingly asked to AI assistants, which have no volume threshold at all. The test isn't the tool's estimate. It's: did a customer ever say this to you? If it appeared in a Module 2 interview, it's real.
The €0 toolkit, honestly
- Your Module 2 research — interview transcripts, survey answers, mined reviews. The single best source, because it's demand in the customer's own words. More below.
- Google autocomplete — type a seed phrase slowly and read the suggestions: real queries, free.
- People Also Ask — the question boxes on a results page; each one you expand breeds more. Question phrasing, free.
- Google Search Console — the queries your site already appears for, with positions and clicks. Free, and the most underused SEO tool alive. If your site has any history, start here: a query sitting at position 15–30 is a strike-first target.
- Google Keyword Planner — volume ranges, free with an ads account and no spend required; the signup is mildly awkward and the lesson walks it.
- Google Trends — direction and seasonality, free. (Ostara's November–December spike is visible here before it hits her shop.)
- Community reading — the forums, subreddits and groups where your buyers talk. You did this in Module 2 as review mining; now read for phrasing.
- Competitor page titles — what pages your alternatives bothered to build tells you what they believe converts.
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools — the free tier for your own verified site; a paid-suite taster with real backlink and keyword data for your domain only.
Named and not required: Ahrefs, Semrush and friends at €100+/month — later, when SEO earns revenue. Not before.
The best keyword source is your own transcripts
Here is the connection most courses miss. In Module 2 you collected customers describing their problem in their own words. Those words are queries.
Storkflow proved it: Lena's forum reading found buyers writing "client intake" and "chasing documents" — almost never "onboarding automation", the industry's phrase. A keyword plan built from the industry's vocabulary would have aimed at queries her buyers never type. Your transcripts are a keyword tool no competitor can subscribe to.
Ostara, end to end
Mateus builds the plan the way you're about to.
Seeds from Module 2. The interview and survey language: "wedding gift", "didn't look like everyone's Instagram plates", "worried it would arrive broken", "handmade dinner set". Note what's absent: nobody said "artisanal tableware".
Expansion. Autocomplete on those seeds yields "handmade ceramic wedding gift", "wedding gift for couple who has everything", "handmade dinner set europe". PAA on the comparison seed: "is stoneware or porcelain better for everyday use", "are handmade plates dishwasher safe".
Own data. GSC shows the shop already gets impressions for "serving bowl for a large table" — 210 impressions, 3 clicks, average position 28 over three months. Position 28 with zero effort is a page one candidate with a real page behind it. Strike first.
The clusters. Thirty keywords settle into five: handmade tableware gifts (commercial — the gift collection page), wedding & new-home gift ideas (commercial guide), stoneware vs porcelain (comparison page), care, durability & safe delivery (informational, but it answers the breakage worry that nearly costs her orders — trust content with a job), and brand & navigational.
The deliberate rejection. "How ceramics are made" has the biggest volume of anything he found — and is deprioritised: purely informational, saturated with generated answers, and the searcher is a hobbyist, not a gift-buyer. The formula below is what killed it, working as intended.
Prioritise by attainability, never by volume
Score every keyword 1–5 on three axes and multiply:
relevance to your offer × intent value × attainability
Attainability asks: can a site like yours realistically rank or get cited for this — given who currently wins it (you looked, in Lesson 6.1)? Volume breaks ties. It never leads, because ranking #41 for a huge term is worth exactly nothing, and a #3 ranking on a tiny term that books appointments is worth everything. Now build yours.
Do
Exercise 6.2.1 — Your keyword & topic plan
Build your keyword plan: at least 30 keywords in exactly 5 topic clusters, each keyword tagged with intent and scored for priority. Start from your customers' words — keep your Module 2 evidence open beside you — expand with the free toolkit, and check Search Console if your site has history. Expect this to take a full hour — it's the foundation of the whole module.
Write these down — in your plan document, or on the worksheet at the end of this lesson.
| What to build | Guidance |
|---|---|
| Five clusters | For each: a name (up to 6 words), an intent summary (up to 20 words), and its target page — existing landing page · new page needed · blog content |
| At least 30 keywords | For each: the keyword · its cluster · intent (informational · commercial · transactional · navigational) · its source (customer language · autocomplete · PAA · Keyword Planner · Search Console · Trends · competitor · community) · relevance 1–5 · intent value 1–5 · attainability 1–5 · priority = the product of the three scores |
| Your top 5 | The five highest-scoring keywords. If your judgement overrides the arithmetic anywhere, write the reason (up to 25 words per override) |
Check the finished plan: at least 8 keywords with commercial or transactional intent · at least 3 sources used across the set · if more than half the keywords are informational, ask who they will convert · if none is tagged "customer language", your best source went unused.
Where this goes: section 7.2 — Keyword & topic plan — of your Marketing Plan. This is deliverable 1 of the Module 6 Project.
Check
Rubric
Mark your own work against these criteria.
| Criterion | 8–10 | 5–7 | 1–4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer language present | Several keywords traceably from Module 2 words, tagged as such | Customer phrasing present but untagged or token | The whole plan is industry vocabulary |
| Intent balance | ≥ 8 commercial/transactional keywords that connect to money | Balance met numerically but the commercial picks are weak | Nearly all informational |
| Cluster coherence | Each cluster is one topic one page could own | Clusters overlap or one is a grab-bag | "Miscellaneous" clusters, keywords sorted arbitrarily |
| Prioritisation honesty | Attainability scores reflect who actually wins each query (per L1 recon) | Scores plausible but not evidenced | Attainability = 5 on head terms a marketplace owns |
Pass: 5+ on every criterion. Distinction: 8+ on all four.
Quiz — four questions. Pick an answer to see whether you were right.
1. "stoneware vs porcelain — which is better?" is which intent, and what should Ostara build for it?
- a) Transactional — a checkout page
- b) Commercial — a genuine comparison page, ideally using her own materials and durability knowledge ✔
- c) Navigational — a store locator
- d) Informational — nothing, skip it
Why: the searcher is choosing between options before buying — commercial intent. A real comparison page matches it; a checkout page can't win it, and skipping it hands the choosing moment to someone else.
2. Which free source shows the queries your site ALREADY appears for, including position-15-to-5 strike-first wins?
- a) Google Trends
- b) Google Keyword Planner
- c) Google Search Console ✔
- d) People Also Ask
Why: GSC reports your real impressions, clicks and positions. Ostara's "serving bowl for a large table" at position 28 — 210 impressions, 3 clicks — is exactly the kind of target no external tool can see.
3. A hyper-specific query from a customer interview shows "no volume data" in every tool. What does this lesson say?
- a) Delete it — no volume means no demand
- b) Keep it only if a competitor targets it
- c) Keep it — tools miss the tail, assistants have no volume threshold, and a query a real customer asked is real demand ✔
- d) Replace it with the highest-volume synonym
Why: volume tools estimate from samples and round the tail to zero. The evidence standard is whether a customer said it — and Module 2 already collected that evidence.
4. Why was "how ceramics are made" deprioritised despite having the biggest volume in Mateus's research?
- a) It's too hard to write about
- b) Google penalises craft topics
- c) Low relevance and intent value — a hobbyist audience, in an AI-answer-saturated informational query — so the formula scores it down regardless of volume ✔
- d) It had no autocomplete suggestions
Why: relevance × intent value × attainability leads; volume only breaks ties. Big-volume queries that can't convert and can't be won are the most expensive distraction in SEO.
Advance
You now have what agencies charge four figures for: thirty real queries, in five clusters, prioritised by whether you can win them and whether winning pays. And your best source cost nothing, because you collected it in Module 2 without knowing it was a keyword tool.
Next: M6.L3 — Content that ranks — and gets cited. One cluster is your #1 priority. Next lesson you write the brief for the page that wins it — the spec that makes it rank, and makes it the passage an AI answer quotes.
Mark your own work
| Good | Not yet | |
|---|---|---|
| Customers' words used | Keywords traceable to Module 2 transcripts and reviews | Industry vocabulary your buyers never use |
| 30 in 5, genuinely | Every keyword sits in a cluster one page could own | Keywords sorted into clusters after the fact |
| Money intent present | ≥ 8 commercial/transactional keywords | A plan that informs everyone and converts no one |
| Scored with a straight face | Attainability reflects who actually wins each query today | Every score is a 4 or 5 |
Worksheet
THE SCHOOL OF NET MARKETING
Lesson 6.2 — Keyword & topic research on a €0 budget
STEP 1 — SEEDS FROM MODULE 2
Words customers actually used (transcripts, surveys, reviews):
1. ____________________ 2. ____________________
3. ____________________ 4. ____________________
STEP 2 — EXPAND, FOR FREE
☐ Autocomplete on each seed ☐ People Also Ask
☐ Search Console (queries you already appear for)
☐ Keyword Planner ranges ☐ Trends (seasonality)
☐ Community reading ☐ Competitor page titles
Strike-first (already ranking 11–30 in Search Console):
______________________________ position ____
STEP 3 — FIVE CLUSTERS
Intent key: I informational · C commercial
T transactional · N navigational
1. ______________________ intent __ target page __________
2. ______________________ intent __ target page __________
3. ______________________ intent __ target page __________
4. ______________________ intent __ target page __________
5. ______________________ intent __ target page __________
STEP 4 — SCORE (per keyword, on the full sheet)
relevance (1–5) × intent value (1–5) × attainability (1–5)
= priority. Volume breaks ties. It never leads.
My top 5:
1. ________________________________ score ____
2. ________________________________ score ____
3. ________________________________ score ____
4. ________________________________ score ____
5. ________________________________ score ____
SELF-CHECK
☐ At least one cluster came from customers' own words
☐ ≥ 8 keywords are commercial or transactional
☐ ≥ 3 free sources used
☐ No keyword kept purely because its volume is big
Next: Lesson 6.3 — Content that ranks — and gets cited.
theschoolofnetmarketing.com/learn/content-that-ranks-and-gets-cited