Finding the best keywords for your website is much more complicated than simply choosing words that reflect the content. Searchability and competition are also big factors in making the right choice. Essentially you need to balance the likelihood of the search term being used by other more established sites with the likelihood of the keyword being used at all by searchers.
For the purpose of simplicity I’m going to use an example of a fictitious bakery to illustrate this post. The bakery is about to release a new product line – hot butter croissants for delivery to offices and homes. They need a keyword to try to boost the page in Google.
What makes a Good Keyword?
The key to successfully converting visitors is to match their search intent to your content ie. provide information that will be useful to somebody who reads your post or page as a result of searching for it on Google. The metrics that define this are Relevance, Authority and Volume.
Relevance
Relevance relates to the content and purpose of your site. Writing about SEO on this site is relevant because we are a Digital Agency. Writing about Croissant Recipes on a Bakery site is relevant because you’d expect a baker to demonstrate knowledge about the baked!
Authority
Authority is a big thing for Google this year. The concept is that the sites with “Authority” in their field are those with the most backlinks and the most relevant content. If you’re a new website, you won’t have too many backlinks (links from other websites back to yours) but you can cultivate them to an extent and sites such as Pinterest, Medium. YouTube, Facebook etc count. You can create lots of content though. This comes with the caveat that the content needs to be well structured and exceptional. i.e. It’s no good parroting content from other sites in the same industry.
Volume
Volume refers to the number of searches made in a month using the keyword you are researching. Bear in mind that the highest volume keywords are likely to be unspecific and will be used by all of your competitors! Try to get a balance between Volume and Relevance.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is able to tell you the search terms that have been used in order to find any page in your website. A good place to start would be to look at the terms that have generated clicks and to check that the term is featured appropriately on the page. That is in any or all of the

* Title
* H1
* H2
* Body content
* Alt tags (for images)

This will almost inevitably result in higher ratings for the page. But what if I’m starting a new website or launching like my baker friend, a new product line?
Where Can I Find Keyword Suggestions?
Choosing candidate keywords is the easy bit. Choosing the best ones is more troublesome. Intuition is the place to start. What is your post/page about? In this case, Hot Butter Croissants.
The first problem is this – if I choose the word Croissant as a keyword I’m immediately in direct competition with Sainsbury, Marks & Spencer, Aldi, Waitrose, Tesco, Lidl, Asda etc. But I’m a small local bakery so I simply can’t compete with people like this. What do I do?
Google Search Suggestions

The first source of suggestions is Google itself. Typing your search term into the search bar will prompt Google to suggest a number of terms that have been used by people in your locale. These are actual search terms.
Looking at the list I can see that it’s a broad church – I’m seeing terms from cooks, grocery shoppers and one that might suit me, “Croissants Delivery”. Still it’s a very broad selection and the dreaded Tesco are in there so let’s try for a smaller selection by making the search term more specific.