How to do keyword research in five steps, with an AI agent helping

How to do keyword research comes down to five steps: write down the topics your customers care about, expand each into the searches people really type, check demand and difficulty, group the results by intent, and give each page one search to answer. An AI coding agent can now do most of the legwork if you connect it to a keyword data source, and seogeoaeo.ai is the one we use for that.

The agent does not replace judgment. It removes the copying between browser tabs and spreadsheets, which is where most keyword projects stall.

Step 1: write seed topics in customer words

Start with three to five short phrases a buyer would type, not your internal product names. "Invoice software for freelancers" beats "billing platform". Two or three words per seed gives the cleanest results.

If you have a site already, Google Search Console's Performance report shows the queries people typed when your pages appeared, with clicks, impressions and average position. Those queries are the best seeds you will find, because they are already yours.

Step 2: expand each seed into real searches

This is where a keyword research tool earns its place. You want the related searches around each seed, with numbers attached. The seogeoaeo.ai Keyword Research tool returns related Google searches for one topic in the country you choose, each with monthly searches, difficulty, cost per click and trend.

Through MCP, an agent in Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code or Codex calls the same tool by name. A prompt like "run keyword research for each of these five seeds in the UK market and merge the results" replaces an afternoon of manual lookups. Each run costs 34 credits, and the agent can be told a credit ceiling so it stops before spending more than you planned.

Step 3: check demand and difficulty

Look at three numbers together. Monthly searches shows demand. Difficulty shows how much competition sits on the first page. Cost per click is a quiet signal of buyer intent, since advertisers pay more for searches that lead to sales.

All of these are estimates in every tool. Use them to compare options, not as promises. If you already have a long list from a brainstorm, Keyword Metrics scores a pasted list instead of finding new terms.

Step 4: group by intent

seogeoaeo.ai already sorts results into easy wins, blog topics and keywords worth bidding on. Ask the agent to go one level further and group searches that one page could answer together, so you do not write three posts that compete for the same query.

Step 5: give every page one focus search

Put the focus search in the title, the first paragraph and the URL, and answer it in the opening lines. Then write the page for the reader, not the tool.

Once a page is live, return to Search Console after a few weeks to see which queries it picks up. Those become seeds for the next round.

Where other tools fit

Google Keyword Planner is free for anyone with a Google Ads account after they create a campaign, and it gives search and cost estimates aimed at advertisers. Google Trends shows interest on a 0 to 100 scale relative to all searches, which is useful for seasonality but does not give volumes. If you also need rank tracking and site audits in one subscription, Ahrefs and Semrush bundle those with their keyword tools. For an agent that needs keyword data on demand and pays per run, seogeoaeo.ai is the simpler fit.