How to Prepare Keywords for a Backlink Campaign

Every backlink campaign starts with a keyword list, and a rushed or careless one quietly undermines everything built on top of it. We ask every new client for their target keywords before starting any link building work, and the quality of that list determines whether the whole campaign targets something real or something that just sounds important. Here’s how to actually prepare a keyword list worth building a campaign around.

This step gets skipped or rushed more often than any other part of a campaign, usually because it feels like paperwork standing between you and the “real” work of building links. In practice, it’s the single decision that determines whether everything after it actually matters.

Start With What Your Customers Actually Say, Not What You’d Guess

The biggest mistake businesses make is guessing at keywords based on internal industry language rather than how real customers actually search. A business might think of itself as offering “integrated marketing solutions,” while actual customers search “how much does a marketing agency cost” or “best marketing agency near me.” Start by writing down the exact phrases customers use when they call or email you asking about your services, since that raw, unfiltered language is closer to real search behavior than anything your team would generate internally.

Separate Keywords by Intent

Not every keyword serves the same purpose. Informational keywords (“what is domain rating”) bring in people still researching and learning. Commercial keywords (“best link building service”) bring in people comparing options before deciding. Transactional keywords (“buy backlinks DR 50”) bring in people ready to purchase right now. A campaign that only targets informational keywords brings traffic that rarely converts quickly, while one that only targets transactional keywords misses the larger audience still in the research phase. A healthy mix across all three intent types serves your funnel properly rather than optimizing for only one stage of it.

Check Real Search Volume Before Committing

A keyword that sounds important isn’t necessarily searched by anyone. Free tools like Google’s own Keyword Planner (accessed through a free Google Ads account, even without running actual ads) or the free tier of Ubersuggest will show you actual estimated monthly search volume. Don’t build an entire content or link strategy around a keyword with near-zero real search volume just because it sounds like exactly what your business does. Our Keyword Research package ($60) handles this validation professionally using paid tools with more reliable volume data than the free versions provide.

Look at What’s Realistically Winnable

Beyond volume, check keyword difficulty, meaning how hard it would be to actually rank for a given term given who’s currently occupying page one. A brand-new site targeting “SEO services” (an extremely broad, competitive term dominated by huge established agencies) will struggle far more than targeting “SEO services for dental practices in Ohio,” a more specific term with a smaller, more winnable competitive set. Starting with genuinely winnable keywords and expanding into more competitive ones as your site’s authority grows is far more effective than chasing the biggest possible keyword first and getting nowhere for a year.

Study Your Competitors’ Keyword Gaps

Look at which keywords your direct competitors already rank for that you don’t. A Competitor Analysis ($70) reveals this gap directly, showing you exactly which valuable, realistic keywords a competitor has captured that represent a genuine opportunity for you, rather than starting your keyword research from a completely blank slate.

Group Keywords Into Clusters, Not a Flat List

Rather than a single flat list of fifty unrelated keywords, group them into logical clusters around shared themes or pages: all the keywords related to one specific service on one page, all the keywords related to a specific location on another. This clustering approach, sometimes called topic clustering, tells search engines your site has genuine depth on a topic rather than scattered, shallow coverage across unrelated terms, and it directly informs which pages need to exist and what each one should specifically target.

Include Long-Tail Keywords, Not Just the Big Obvious Ones

Long-tail keywords, longer, more specific phrases like “how to remove a manual action penalty from Google” rather than just “Google penalty,” collectively drive significant traffic despite each individual term having lower search volume than a broad head term. They’re also genuinely easier to rank for, since fewer sites compete directly for these more specific phrases. A keyword list that’s all short, broad, competitive terms with no long-tail variety misses a substantial, more achievable opportunity.

Prepare Keywords Specific to Each Location If You’re Local

If your business serves multiple cities or neighborhoods, prepare a distinct keyword set for each location rather than one generic list applied everywhere. “Plumber in Springfield” and “plumber in Riverside” are functionally different keywords requiring their own dedicated content, even if the underlying service is identical. Treating all your locations as one undifferentiated target misses the local specificity that actually drives local search visibility.

Revisit and Update Your List Periodically

Search behavior shifts over time, new competitors enter your market, and your own business offerings evolve. A keyword list built once and never revisited becomes stale, missing new opportunities and still chasing terms that may no longer be worth the effort. Revisiting your keyword strategy every 6-12 months, or whenever you add a genuinely new service or enter a new market, keeps your targeting aligned with how people are actually searching right now rather than how they searched when the list was first built.

What Happens If You Skip This Step Entirely

We’ve seen businesses commission months of content and link building around keywords chosen purely on instinct, only to discover through an audit that the actual search volume for those terms was negligible the whole time. That work wasn’t wasted in every sense (well-written content still has some value), but it wasn’t strategically targeted, and the business effectively paid for effort that couldn’t have delivered the growth they expected, regardless of how well it was executed.

Understand Search Intent Mismatches Before You Target Something

Some keywords look appealing on paper but carry a search intent that doesn’t actually match what you’re offering. If a keyword’s top-ranking results are all long-form educational guides but your page is a short product listing, that mismatch signals to Google that your page might not satisfy what people actually want when they search that term, regardless of how well-optimized it otherwise is. Before committing to a keyword, look at what’s currently ranking for it and honestly assess whether your intended page type matches that pattern, or whether you’d need a different kind of content entirely to genuinely compete.

Don’t Ignore Seasonal and Trending Variations

Some industries have keywords with meaningful seasonal search volume swings, tax preparation services spiking every spring, holiday-related retail terms spiking in November and December, home heating repair searches spiking with the first cold snap of the year. Building these seasonal patterns into your keyword calendar means preparing and publishing relevant content ahead of the spike rather than scrambling once it’s already underway, since content needs time to get indexed and start ranking before the seasonal window actually opens.

Keep a Living Document, Not a One-Time List

Rather than treating keyword research as a single project with a defined end date, keep an ongoing, living spreadsheet or document that gets updated as you notice new customer phrases, new competitor content, or new seasonal patterns. This turns keyword research from an occasional big project into an ongoing habit that compounds over time, catching opportunities as they emerge rather than only during scheduled quarterly reviews.

Getting Your Keyword List Built Properly

If you’re about to start a content or link building campaign and haven’t validated your target keywords yet, this is worth doing before spending on anything else. Order a Keyword Research package or get a free SEO audit that includes an initial keyword gap analysis, so everything built afterward targets terms real people are actually searching for, instead of terms that just sound right in a planning meeting but nobody is actually typing into Google.