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Shopify articles post themselves →Keyword research for a small business is easier to show than to explain, so this article does the whole job in front of you. Our example is a fictional but realistic firm: Harbourside IT, a ten-person IT support company in Bristol with a website, five service pages and a blog nobody has touched since 2023. The process below works the same way for an accountant, a plumber or a Shopify shop; only the words change.
We will use the tools the mainstream guides use: Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, and a look at what SEMrush or Ahrefs add for those willing to pay. Each step is labelled free or paid so you know exactly where the costs sit.
What keyword research for a small business should produce
The goal is not a long list of keywords. Lists are easy and useless. The goal is a map: fifteen to twenty keywords, each assigned to a specific page on your site, each with a one-line reason it made the cut. That map becomes your content plan for the next few months.
The list is not the deliverable. The map is.
Step one: brainstorm seed terms (free, thirty minutes)
Seed terms are the raw phrases everything else grows from. You do not need a tool for this step, you need honesty about what you actually sell and who buys it. For Harbourside IT, three questions produce the seeds:
- What do we sell? Managed IT support, cyber security, Microsoft 365 migration, emergency call-outs.
- Who buys it? Accountants, solicitors, small professional firms of five to fifty staff, mostly within an hour of Bristol.
- What do prospects ask on the phone? "How much does IT support cost per user?", "Do we need Cyber Essentials?", "Can you get us off our old server?"
That gives roughly a dozen seeds: it support bristol, managed it services, it support cost, cyber essentials, office 365 migration, it support for accountants, and so on. Write them down; do not judge them yet.
Step two: pull numbers from Google Keyword Planner (free)
Keyword Planner lives inside Google Ads. You need a free Ads account, but you do not need to run any ads or spend anything. One catch: without an active campaign, Planner shows search volume as a range rather than an exact figure. The ranges are buckets: 10 to 100 searches a month, 100 to 1K, 1K to 10K, and up.
Feed the seeds in and Planner returns each term's bucket plus hundreds of related suggestions. For Harbourside IT, the pattern that comes back looks like this: the broad national terms such as "it support for small business" land in the 1K to 10K bucket, the local terms such as "it support bristol" land in 100 to 1K, and the specific buyer questions such as "break fix vs managed it support" land in 10 to 100.
Two things to know about reading Planner. First, the Competition column measures advertisers bidding on the term, not how hard it is to rank organically; ignore it for SEO. Second, Planner groups close variants together, so "it support in bristol" and "bristol it support" report as one number. That is fine; Google treats them as the same query too.
Rule of thumb: for a small local firm, the 100 to 1K bucket is usually the sweet spot. The 1K to 10K terms are dominated by national brands, and the 10 to 100 terms are where individual blog posts win easily.
Step three: mine Search Console for keywords you already half-rank for (free)
Keyword Planner tells you what people search. Search Console tells you what Google already shows your site for, which is far more valuable because those rankings are half-built. If your site is not connected yet, our Search Console setup guide covers it in about ten minutes.
Open the Performance report, set the date range to the last three months, and sort by impressions. You are hunting for queries with plenty of impressions but an average position between 8 and 30: page one's basement and page two. For Harbourside IT, this surfaces things the team never planned for, such as "sharepoint vs onedrive for business" getting impressions against a two-line mention in an old post, and "cyber essentials cost" hovering at position 14 against the cyber security service page.
Every query in that 8 to 30 band goes straight into the map. Improving an existing page from position 14 to position 4 is weeks of work; ranking a new page from nothing is months.
Step four: what SEMrush or Ahrefs add (paid)
Everything above is free. The paid tools, SEMrush and Ahrefs being the standard pair, add three things: exact monthly volumes instead of buckets, a keyword difficulty score estimating how hard each term is to rank for, and competitor gap analysis showing keywords rival firms rank for that you do not. Starter plans for both sit north of £100 a month.
Are they worth it for a fifteen-keyword map? Usually not. The difficulty scores mostly confirm what common sense already told you: broad national terms are hard, specific local and question terms are easy. The gap analysis is genuinely useful, but you can run it during a free trial, extract what you need, and cancel. If you want to stay entirely free, our guide to finding keywords without paid tools walks the zero-budget route in full.
The finished keyword map
Here is Harbourside IT's output: fifteen keywords, each mapped to a page, with the reasoning. Planner column shows the free-tier volume bucket.
| Keyword | Planner range | Target page | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| it support bristol | 100 to 1K | Homepage | Core local term, buying intent |
| managed it services bristol | 100 to 1K | Managed IT service page | Highest-value service, local |
| emergency it support bristol | 10 to 100 | Emergency call-out page | Low volume, urgent buyers |
| it support for accountants | 10 to 100 | New sector page | Best-fit client type |
| it support for solicitors | 10 to 100 | New sector page | Second-best client type |
| outsourced it support cost uk | 100 to 1K | New pricing guide | Every prospect asks this |
| it support cost per user | 10 to 100 | Same pricing guide | Variant, same intent |
| break fix vs managed it support | 10 to 100 | New blog post | Buyers comparing models |
| cyber essentials cost | 100 to 1K | Cyber security page (improve) | Already position 14 in GSC |
| what is cyber essentials plus | 1K to 10K | New blog post | Research-stage prospects |
| cyber essentials certification help | 100 to 1K | Cyber security page | Buying intent for a real service |
| office 365 migration services | 100 to 1K | Migration service page | Named service, commercial intent |
| sharepoint vs onedrive for business | 1K to 10K | New blog post | Already getting impressions |
| how often should you replace work laptops | 10 to 100 | New blog post | Real client question, no competition |
| what to do when company email goes down | 10 to 100 | New blog post | Emergency searchers become leads |
Notice the split: five keywords go to existing service pages, two justify new sector pages, and the rest become blog posts. Notice also what got cut. "it support for small business" at 1K to 10K looks tempting, but it is a national term contested by companies fifty times Harbourside's size, and the searcher could be anywhere in the country. Volume without winnable intent is a trap.
Worked example takeaway: the whole process took one afternoon and cost nothing. Seeds from real client conversations, buckets from Keyword Planner, quick wins from Search Console, and a map of fifteen keywords to twelve pages.
Where Helio SEO fits in
Helio SEO runs this process automatically when it scans a customer's site, then shows the keyword reasoning in a dashboard rather than hiding it, and writes the mapped articles one per day. If you enjoyed doing the research above by hand, you can absolutely keep it that way; the map is the hard part, and now you have one.