Keyword Research: Moving beyond traditional lists, volume metrics or user intent

Most SEOs still rely on standard keyword research — a list of terms, information about search volume, maybe difficulty, etc.

The reality is, that approach is outdated.

People don’t search with one word or a few phrases anymore. They type full questions, natural sentences, and multi-intent queries.

It’s time to think beyond single terms and where to put them on the page, or creating enormous chunks of topical clusters that cover all you can imagine. Go beyond mapping the actual way users search and try to predict what they will see as a result based on their intent.

Let me explain. For example, you offer a B2B marketing service and you have a service SEO page. What would be your approach? Keyword research. Possible results like SEO, SEO Audit, Technical SEO, etc., and you will try to have them in the important, in-your-opinion places, maybe create additional content related to them, etc. You can go even further using tools like “People Also Ask” and create FAQ or How-To sections. All good, but search is evolving from a list of blue links into a personalized experience.

Given AI-powered searches, SEO is no longer about ranking a single page for a keyword. It’s not even just about topical coverage and semantic authority. Appearing across multiple AI-generated clusters matters more than a single “#1 position.”

What happens now when we search:

• Queries are broken into sub-queries server-side to cover multiple angles.
• Personalization drives the results, factoring in account history, location and device.
• AI creates knowledge guides dynamically, so the user sees a structured, evolving view rather than static links.

Here is the moment to share my recent approach:

Do keyword research in whatever way you prefer, but after that, just use a prompt asking your favourite AI something like:

“Here are my keywords (data), here is the site/URL I want to optimize. Please generate 3 suggestions per keyword of what an actual user may search based on the intent and best match to the content. Next, for each of these new suggested probable real searches, create a list of ‘𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐅𝐚𝐧-𝐎𝐮𝐭’ (the broken server-side queries on which the result is shown).”

Now focus on those new “keywords”, not the initial volume-based or “real” one you think may be, but the synthetically created from the AI for showing you the result.

Experiment:

• Initial Keyword: Technical SEO audit; SEO strategy
• URL: https://marinpopov.com/seo-services/
• Prompt: Leave it up to you 🙂

Result:

In my case, ChatGPT slightly went in a different direction and missed the instruction related to the B2B service page 🙂 — but the decision for the provided results is actually correct, as the initial keywords are informational.

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