What Is a Keyword?

Despite the name, a keyword is rarely a single word: "running shoes for tarmac" is a keyword just as much as "running shoes". In Spanish SEO both the English "keyword" and the translation "palabra clave" are in use, while German SEO has largely adopted the English word.

It helps to separate the keyword from the query. A query is what someone actually typed, with typos and word order of their own. A keyword is the term that groups many similar queries and that a page targets. Search Console, for example, shows queries; working with keywords means sorting them.

By length and volume, people distinguish generic keywords, short and searched a lot, from long tail keywords, longer and more specific, with fewer searches but a clearer intent. Behind each one sits a search intent: to learn, to compare, to buy or to reach a particular website.

Google recommends thinking about the words someone would use to find a piece of content, and it points out that not everyone searches the same way. Its starter guide gives the example of one person searching for "charcuterie" and another for "cheese board" to find the same thing. The same happens with "trainers" and "running shoes".

Keyword work usually follows three steps. First, possible searches are gathered with keyword research tools and with your own Search Console data. Next, those with the same intent are grouped, because they belong on the same page. Finally, you decide which page serves each group and what it is called.

Today's search engines do not need a page to repeat the search word for word in order to show it. That is why a keyword helps more with deciding what a page is about and how it presents itself than with counting how often it appears.

The keyword decides which page is worth creating and what it should be called. If a page answers no real search, nobody reaches it from a search engine, however well it is written. And if several pages on the same site target the same keyword, they compete with each other.

Google is clear about what does not work. Its starter guide says that Google Search does not use the keywords meta tag and that there is no magical word count, minimum or maximum. Its spam policies define keyword stuffing as filling a page with keywords to manipulate rankings, for example repeating the same words so often that the text sounds unnatural.

This glossary shows how both forms of the term live side by side in Spanish. Measured in the zds.es sitemap on 13 October 2026, of the Spanish entries whose name includes the term, seven, counting this one, use keyword in the address, such as keyword research or long tail keyword, and three use palabras clave, such as densidad de palabras clave. In German and English, all of them use Keyword. Each entry also targets one specific search, the question "what is" or "what are" followed by the term, which appears in its address.

• Give each page one main keyword and gather its variants with the same intent on that page.
• Use the words your audience searches with, even if you use different ones internally.
• Include the keyword in the title, the h1 and the address where it fits naturally.
• Look at search intent before volume.
• Check in Search Console which queries each page actually appears for.
• Before creating a new page, check whether an existing page on the site already answers the same keyword.

• Repeating the keyword artificially, which Google treats as keyword stuffing.
• Filling in the keywords meta tag, which Google does not use.
• Creating several pages for near-identical variants of the same search.
• Choosing keywords by volume alone, without checking whether the intent fits the page.
• Chasing a minimum word count for each text.