Keyword Research
Keyword Research
What is keyword research?
- Finding the words customers actually search for
- Distinguish search intent (informational vs. purchase)
- Long-tail often converts better
Run keyword research properly and even the language of your content planning meetings changes. Where the team lead’s preferences and the sales team’s requests used to clash over “what do we write this month,” there is now a shared basis for decisions: monthly search volume and the number of competing pages. Titles change too. “Smart logistics solution adoption strategy” becomes what customers actually type, “warehouse automation cost.” It also strips out jargon that only works inside the company, so ad copy, landing page titles, and even catalog item names get aligned to the same wording.
In practice, it works best to sort keywords by search intent. The typical types are informational ('how to…', 'what is…'), comparison ('A vs B', 'best'), and transactional ('quote', 'implementation cost', 'unit price'). Even for the same product, different intent calls for a different content format: guide articles for informational queries, case studies and search ads for transactional ones. Don’t apply B2C search-volume standards as they are. The B2B audience itself is small, so even a keyword with 50–300 searches a month is well worth competing for. Start with the Naver Search Ads keyword tool, Google Keyword Planner, and the queries already piling up in Search Console that get impressions but no clicks. It also helps to be clear that this is not about stuffing keywords into body text. It is a planning-stage task: deciding which topics are worth writing about and which are not.
The most common mistake is picking only the big head keyword with the highest search volume. If the top 10 results for a 10,000-searches-a-month keyword are already portals, large corporations, and media outlets, even six months of effort won’t get you off page 3. Before search volume, look at the caliber of the pages already ranking at the top. There is an opposite misconception too: betting on your own campaign name or coined brand term as a keyword. If its search volume is zero, traffic is zero no matter how good the article is. Doing the research once and stopping is also a problem. If you don’t reopen the queries that actually bring traffic every quarter, your keyword list goes stale within six months, and customers are already searching with different words.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Junyoung NohConsumer and generational trend analyst & AI content marketing specialistA practice that took shape alongside the growth of search engine optimization (SEO) and became systematic with the arrival of search-volume and competition data tools.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Company A makes industrial automation equipment, with 120 employees and annual revenue of about KRW 30 billion (≈ US$22,445,000). Its marketing team published 40 blog posts over six months, yet monthly visitors stayed in the 300s and inquiries stuck at 2 a month. When the CEO asked, 'Posts keep piling up, so why aren’t the calls coming in?', Manager Kim on the marketing team started by re-examining the traffic sources.
- Manager Kim went through the 47 inquiry emails from the last three months and the sales team’s call notes, and pulled out 82 phrases customers actually used. “Smart factory implementation” never appeared once, while “how to collect equipment data” appeared nine times.
- We entered 82 keywords into Naver Search Ads’ keyword tool. The head keyword drew 9,800 searches a month, but all of the top 10 results were pages from large corporations and media outlets, while 14 long-tail keywords at 60–400 searches a month had fewer than 5 competing pages.
- The head of sales put it bluntly: "Someone who arrives searching 'how to…' isn’t buying yet." So the 9 informational keywords went to the blog, and the 5 transactional ones, such as 'equipment installation cost,' went to case study pages and search ads.
- Over six weeks, Manager Kim rewrote the titles and subheadings of 12 existing posts in customer language. For new posts, the rule was one article per keyword, so Kim wrote just 8 and resisted the urge to do more.
- Four months later, monthly visitors grew from the 300s to the 1,400s and inquiries from 2 to 11 a month, with 7 of them coming from three long-tail keywords. Cost per ad click also fell from KRW 4,200 (≈ US$3) to KRW 1,600 (≈ US$1).