How to choose keywords for your website

Keywords are the phrases and questions a customer types into search engines and AI engines to reach information, a service or a product. They are also called search terms or search phrases, and a keyword made of several connected words is often called a keyword phrase. They matter for your business website because they are the direct meeting point between what the buyer asks for in the market and the page where you present your service or product. When your pages match the customer's language and intent, the customer reaches you at the moment of purchase. When your pages are written in internal terms nobody else uses, they stay far from the buyers.

In everyday work, many business owners fall into an unintended language gap between what they write on their sites and what the real customer types. The owner of a dental clinic in Cairo may describe the service in highly specialised medical terms, while the patient searches for a phrase that describes their own problem, or asks what the procedure costs and how long it takes. The owner of a furniture store in Riyadh may publish only the internal model names of the products, while the buyer searches for the piece by description, dimensions, type of wood and delivery inside the city. When you build your pages on your customers' real keywords, you close that gap, and every page on your site answers a clear request in the market.

Choosing keywords is the foundation of search engine optimisation, known as SEO. That is the practical work on your site's content and technical structure so that its pages rise in the free, unpaid search results when a customer searches in your field, and the full guide to its parts is What is SEO? A guide to search engine optimisation. The financial benefit is direct. A visitor who reaches you through a precise buying keyword is searching, on their own, for what you sell, unlike a general advert that puts your message in front of people who may not need your service right now.

One point should be clear from the start. This guide is for owners of commercial websites, online stores and service providers who want real customers to reach the pages of their sites. Some people confuse the keywords of website pages with the tags used for video channels on social platforms. That is a different subject altogether, and it has nothing to do with how the pages of your business site are structured, indexed and led in search engines and AI engines.

Keywords fall into types by the length and precision of the phrase, and by the country and season the search comes from. Telling them apart protects your budget and your time from chasing general words that bring no sales. The practical rule is this: the more specific a keyword phrase is, and the closer it comes to describing the buyer's need and circumstances, the less random competition there is for it and the more likely the visitor is to become a real customer.

By length and precision, search phrases fall into two main groups, and your site needs a balance between them.

Short-tail keywords are single words or short, general phrases that describe a wide sector without saying what the searcher wants, such as typing the word "furniture" or "teeth". Many people search with these words for very different reasons. Some are students, some are casual browsers and some are buyers. That is why competition for them is high and their direct return in sales is low, because the searcher's purpose is unclear.

Long-tail keywords, also called keyword phrases, are phrases of several words or full questions in which the searcher states the type of product or service and the city or condition they care about. Examples are a search for a wooden dining table for a small space in Riyadh, or a question about the steps of same-day dental implants in Cairo. These phrases come from a buyer who knows what they want and is close to deciding.

The table below sets out the practical differences between the two types as they affect your business website.

Search intent is the real goal that makes a customer type a keyword into a search engine or an AI engine at that moment. A customer may type a phrase to learn something, to compare options and prices, to buy or book straight away, or to reach a specific site whose name they already know. Understanding intent is the deciding factor in choosing keywords, because matching a page to the searcher's intent is what turns a visit into sales. Ignoring it brings visitors who read your page, leave it, and do nothing of commercial value.

In any commercial or service sector, search intent falls into four main types, and your site needs the right page for each one.

• Informational intent, where the searcher asks a question to understand a subject, learn how something works or find a first solution to a problem. At a dental clinic in Cairo, that is someone asking why teeth feel sensitive after whitening. At a furniture store in Riyadh, it is someone asking how to clean linen fabric. This searcher is not ready to pay at this moment, but they trust the site that answers their question clearly and come back to it when they decide to buy. Guides and teaching articles suit them.
• Commercial intent to compare, where the buyer knows their need and starts weighing alternatives, types and specifications before choosing. That might be someone comparing beech and oak for bedrooms, or comparing types of cosmetic dental veneers and their expected lifespans. This searcher is very close to buying and needs an honest comparison page that sets out the numbers and the differences clearly enough to persuade them to choose you.
• Transactional intent, to buy or sign, where the searcher has already decided to buy and is looking for the party to order from or book with now. They type phrases that ask for a price, a booking, a purchase or delivery in their city, such as booking a dental implant appointment in Cairo or buying a meeting-room table in Riyadh. These keywords carry the highest commercial value, and they should lead the searcher straight to the service or product page that shows the price, the details and a direct order button.
• Navigational intent, to reach a specific site, where the searcher types the name of your business or your own product name to reach your site in particular, because they have heard of you before. Your site's job here is to make its home page, contact page and service pages clear and indexed so the customer finds them at once, with no effort.

You can find your website's real keywords for free from four practical sources open to every business owner. They start with your own site's data in Google Search Console, followed by the conversations of your sales and customer service teams, the questions customers send you directly, and then Google's results page with the suggestions and questions it shows. Relying on these four sources saves you from a random hunt for an outside keyword website that works from estimates, because they give you the real phrases your actual customers type in your market today.

The first and most accurate source for any existing website is Google Search Console, a free official Google service that helps you monitor how your site performs on Google Search and understand how people reach you. Inside it is the Performance report for search results. This is the real source of your site's keywords, because it shows the phrases in which your pages were actually shown to searchers, and it gives you four basic measures for each phrase.

• Clicks are the number of times a user clicked your site's link in Google Search results and went to your page.
• Impressions are the number of times your site's link was shown to searchers in the results, even if they did not click it. This shows you the keywords your pages have started to appear for and which need improving so they win clicks.
• Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. It tells you how attractive your page title and description are to the reader compared with the results beside them.
• Average position is the average position of your site's topmost result on the search page for that keyword.

You choose your website's keywords and build their map in six practical steps, in order. You begin by listing your buying topics and collecting the different words for the same meaning, then you check your current pages in Google Search Console and sort the phrases by search intent. After that you assess the competing sites in search and in AI answers, assign each group of keywords to one specific page in a keyword map, and then follow performance and update the pages regularly. Following this order prevents random work and makes sure two pages of your site never compete for the same keyword.

A keyword map is an organising table that connects each group of keywords and questions with a close meaning and the same search intent to one specific page on your site. It lets you see which page is responsible for which topic, and it exposes the buying topics that still have no page. To do this in practice, follow the six steps below in order.

1. List your buying topics and collect the different words for the same meaning. Write down every service or product category your business sells, and under each one note the different words customers use to describe it. Google Search Central's guide points out that people use different vocabulary to search for the same thing, with the example of one person searching for a charcuterie board by its specialist term while another searches for it as a "cheese board". So write beside each service its official name and the common names buyers use in your country.
2. Check your current pages in Google Search Console. Before writing any new content, open your site's account and review the page indexing report in Google Search Console to make sure your main pages are indexed and technically sound. Then open the Performance report and look at each of your service pages to see the queries that bring it impressions and clicks, and its current positions in your target country. This step protects you from tearing down a page that works, or from writing a new page for a topic you already own that only needs developing and clarifying.
3. Sort the phrases and questions by search intent. Divide the keywords you gathered from the Performance report, the sales conversations and the results page into groups by the searcher's purpose. Put buying, price-request and booking phrases with the service and product pages, comparison questions with the comparison pages, and informational questions and how-to steps with the teaching guides.
4. Assess the competing sites in search results and in AI answers. Search with the phrases and questions you chose and read the pages that lead in traditional results and in AI answers, to see what they gave and what they left out in local detail, numbers or conditions. To know precisely which competing site ChatGPT, Gemini and Google cite for your customers' full buying questions, you can analyse these questions in Tasadr by the country of your market, and you will find how to pick the questions that matter most for your business in the guide on how to choose the questions you analyse your leadership on.
5. Build the keyword map and give each group one page. Open a simple table with one row for each page of your site, whether it is an existing page that needs improving or a new page you will create. Beside it write the page's goal, its main keyword, and the group of related phrases and sub-questions that it answers on the same subject. The basic rule is never to assign two different pages on your site to the same keyword and the same search intent, because that scatters your site's strength and makes your two pages compete with each other instead of with other sites.
6. Follow performance after publishing and update your pages regularly. After you publish or edit pages according to the map, follow the change in impressions, clicks and average position in the Performance report over time. Adjust titles, or add paragraphs that answer the new questions rising in your queries. If you would rather hand this work to a specialist party, the guide on how to choose an SEO company that suits your site gives the practical criteria for judging any party before you contract with them.

You place keywords naturally in six main places that help the reader and the engine understand the page's subject at once. These are the page title and its description, the main heading, the opening paragraph, the sub-headings, the body of the explanation, and the text of internal links. The aim of putting a keyword in these places is not to repeat the wording mechanically. It is to reassure the buyer from the first moment that they have reached the page that answers their request precisely, and to make the page's subject clear to search systems and AI systems.

The documentation of Google Search Central gives two facts that relieve site owners and writers of excessive worry while writing. The first is that Google's language matching systems are sophisticated and can understand how a page relates to many queries, even when you have not written every form word for word. Even so, varying your wording naturally is still useful, because it lets you use more of the words people really search with. The second is that the order of heading levels in the code does not matter to Google Search, although a logical order of headings helps screen readers read the page easily, and there is no ideal number of headings on one page.

Following these rules, spread your keywords and their related phrases across the page like this.

• The page title and the meta description, the two lines shown to the searcher on the results page before they click your link. Put the main keyword in the page title in clear language that states the benefit, and write in the meta description an accurate summary of what the reader will find inside the page, to raise the click-through rate.
• The main heading of the page, the first heading at the top of the page. It should match the subject of the page and the main keyword or question the visitor came for, in correct, direct wording with no ambiguity.
• The opening paragraph and the direct answer. Start the page with a paragraph that goes straight to the subject and includes the main keyword naturally, and answer the searcher's question in its first or second sentence before moving to the details. You will find the practical way to write this paragraph in the guide on how to write a paragraph an AI engine quotes in its answer.
• The sub-headings on the page. Word each sub-heading as a real question or a clear phrase that covers one side of the subject and the sub-questions the customer asks, and begin under each sub-heading with a direct, explicit answer before the explanation and the examples.
• The body paragraphs and the practical examples. Write your explanation in natural, smooth language that uses the related words and local terms you gathered in the keyword map, and place them in useful sentences that give prices, specifications, conditions or practical steps the reader needs.
• The anchor text of internal links between your pages. When you point from your page to another service page or a supporting guide on your site, make the clickable text describe clearly the subject of the page the reader is going to, instead of vague phrases such as "click here". That helps the reader and the engine understand how the pages of your site relate to each other.

The mistakes that hurt your site or waste your time when you use keywords come down to four main ones. They are keyword stuffing and excessive repetition in the text, spending time filling in the unused keywords meta tag, trying to win ranking by cramming keywords into the domain name or the page URL, and chasing general short words while neglecting the buyer's real questions. Falling into these mistakes either exposes your site to a breach of search policies or sends your team's effort into work that moves neither your ranking nor your sales a single step.

The official documentation of Google Search Central states the search engine's position on these practices plainly, leaving no room for the rumours that circulate in the market.

• Keyword stuffing and excessive repetition. Keyword stuffing means forcing the same keyword phrase or its close variations into every sentence and paragraph in an artificial way the meaning does not call for. Google Search Central's guide says that excessively repeating the same words, even in variations, is tiring for users, and that keyword stuffing is against Google's spam policies. The practical result for your business is that text packed with keywords puts off the buyer who reads the page and costs them their trust in your professionalism, and it also exposes the page to a breach of search policies.
• Wasting time on the keywords meta tag in the code. The keywords meta tag, written meta keywords in the page code, is an old field in the page header in which site owners used to write a list of keywords. Google Search Central states plainly that Google Search does not use the keywords meta tag at all. Time your team spends filling in this field on the site's pages is therefore wasted effort, which the engine does not read and on which it builds no ranking.
• Buying new domains or lengthening URLs with keywords. Some site owners think that buying a domain name that contains the keyword, or cramming a string of words into the page address, will lift the page to the top positions automatically. Google Search Central's guide explains that keywords in the domain name or in the URL have hardly any effect on a page's ranking, and that their effect goes no further than being displayed in the breadcrumb trail in search results. It is better to keep your brand name in your domain and make your page URLs short and clear to the reader.
• Chasing single words and repeating the same topic across several pages. When a furniture store in Riyadh puts all its effort into one general single word and neglects specific buying phrases and comparison questions, it enters an unequal competition and does not speak to the buyer who is ready. Likewise, when a site publishes several short, similar articles aimed at the same keyword in the belief that it is surrounding the results, it is in fact weakening all of its pages. The right solution is to gather the full information on one comprehensive, strong page for each topic in the keyword map.

AI engines have changed buyer behaviour from typing short, broken phrases into a search box to asking a full, detailed question and expecting a ready, direct answer that compares the options for them and recommends trustworthy sources. This shift is happening in front of your customer today, in the search features built into Google such as Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, and in chat engines such as ChatGPT and Gemini. It means that targeting only short keywords, without answering the full buying questions, leaves your site outside the answer the customer reads first.

To handle this change with practical awareness, it helps to know the basic terms that govern how these engines work with the pages of your site.

Google AI Overviews is the AI-written summary that Google shows at the top of the usual search results page to answer the searcher's question directly, with links to the sources it relied on.

Google AI Mode is the integrated conversational mode inside Google Search that lets the searcher ask detailed questions and follow-up questions and get expanded answers with their sources.

Optimising for AI answers (GEO) is the work on your site's content and structure so that AI engines choose it as a reliable source and place its link inside their answers. You will find the detailed explanation on the page What is GEO? Optimising for AI answers, and the full comparison with SEO in the guide on the difference between SEO, GEO and AEO, and which one your site needs.

Query fan-out is the process in which an engine turns the customer's full question into several sub-searches that cover sides of the question such as prices, conditions, alternatives and the city. You will find its effect on building your pages explained in what query fan-out is and what it changes in your page.

Zero-click search is when the buyer gets a complete answer from the AI summary at the top of the page, without scrolling down to click the traditional search result links. You will find what it means commercially for your site in what zero-click search is and what it means for your site.

A citation is when an AI engine places the link of your page as a trusted source inside its answer so that the reader can move from it to your site, as detailed in what a citation in AI answers is.

On the technical side, the official Google Search Central documentation on AI features and your website explains that, for a page to be shown as a supporting link in Google AI Overviews or Google AI Mode, it must be indexed in Google and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and there are no extra technical requirements beyond that. This means a sound technical foundation in SEO is the basic condition for your pages to enter AI answers.

On the side of how content is written, the academic research paper in the field of GEO (generative engine optimisation), "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", published on arXiv in November 2023 and presented at the KDD conference in 2024, studied how generative engines choose their sources. In their experiments the researchers found that adding quotations, statistics and cited sources to a page's text raised its presence in generative engines' answers by about 30% to 40%, while traditional keyword stuffing added little. These percentages are results of academic experiments that show what the engines favoured in the study. They are not a fixed promise for your site. But they show in practice that the engine looks for specific facts and an explicit answer on which to build its paragraph, not for repeated words.

The table below shows how your work on keywords fits together with your work on your customers' full questions.

You analyse where your site leads in keywords and in AI answers together when you follow how your traditional search phrases perform in Google Search Console and their visits in Google Analytics, a service that analyses your site's traffic and how users behave once they reach your pages. Alongside this data, you analyse the full questions your customers ask in your country inside AI engines, to learn whether your site is cited in them or the recommendation goes to competing sites. Combining the two readings is necessary because traditional search reports tell you which phrases brought clicks from the results page, but they do not show you what ChatGPT or Gemini told your customer, or which site was cited inside the AI answer.

Tasadr is an Arabic platform for competitive analysis in AI search, which accompanies you on a complete journey from analysis to execution until you lead its answers. Instead of only watching single keywords cut off from the buying context, the analysis works on the full questions that buyers in your field ask, with the target country set for each site, so you see the answers and sources as they are shown to the customer in your real market.

For each of your customers' questions, the analysis shows your site's position in each AI engine in one of four clear states.

• Cited with a link, meaning your page's link is placed as a source inside the engine's answer, so the reader can click it and go straight to your site.
• Named without a link, meaning your business name appears in the text of the answer the engine wrote, but no link is attached to take the customer to your page.
• Left out, meaning the engine wrote a complete answer to the question and cited other sites, while your site's name and link are missing from the answer.
• No answer, meaning the engine wrote no answer to this question.