There’s no official list of keyword types. I’ve seen guides list 4 types of keywords, some list 27. Most of those “types” are just different ways of sorting the same list of searches, and only a handful of them change what you actually do.
The one that matters most is search intent, or in other words, what the person searching wants. After that, it’s how many people search it, whether it names a brand, whether they want something nearby, and what job the keyword does on your page.
Every example below is real, and most come from one niche – espresso machines. Plumbers and lawyers fill in where espresso doesn’t have a good example.
Keyword types at a glance
| Type | What it means | Real example | Searches/mo |
| Informational | They want to learn something | how to make espresso | 12,000 |
| Navigational | They want a specific site | breville customer service | 2,500 |
| Commercial | They’re comparing before buying | best espresso machine | 38,000 |
| Transactional | They’re ready to buy | espresso machine sale | 1,000 |
| Head term (short tail) | Broad and popular | espresso machine | 341,000 |
| Long tail | Specific, with few searches | breville barista express vs pro | 150 |
| Branded | Includes a brand name | breville barista express | 77,000 |
| Generic (non-branded) | No brand name | espresso machine with grinder | 9,100 |
| Local | They want something nearby | espresso machine repair near me | 900 |
| Seasonal | Spikes at the same time every year | espresso machine black friday | 3,000 |
| Question | Asked as a question | why is my espresso bitter | 500 |
| High-CPC | Advertisers pay a lot per click | emergency plumber ($20 a click) | 122,000 |
| Primary and secondary | A page’s main keyword, and the close variants on the same page | best espresso machine, best espresso machine for beginners | 38,000 and 1,800 |
One keyword can be several of these at once. “espresso machine repair near me” is local, generic and transactional, because each type sorts the same searches by something different.
What a keyword is (and what “organic keywords” means)
A keyword is whatever someone types or says into a search engine. “espresso machine” is a keyword, and so is “why is my espresso bitter.” In SEO, your keywords are the searches you want your pages to show up for.
Google’s SEO Starter Guide boils keyword research down to one idea: think about the words people might search for when they’re looking for what you have. The types in this article are ways of sorting those words, so you know which page to build and what to put on it.
Two related terms get mixed up a lot. Organic keywords are the searches your site already shows up for in the regular, unpaid results. Paid keywords are the ones you bid on in Google Ads.
You can see your organic keywords in Google Search Console, under Performance, in the Queries tab. Ahrefs and Semrush also show them for any site (albeit in the smaller numbers), including your competitors’.
What I am writing about today is all about the organic side, but paid data still helps, and cost per click comes back later as one of the better signals of what a keyword is worth.
The 4 types of keywords by search intent
Search intent is what the person wants when they search. It’s the sort that matters most, because it tells you what kind of page has a chance of ranking.
The “4 types of keywords” come from here, and they’re older than most SEO advice. In 2002, Andrei Broder, a researcher who’d spent years at AltaVista (one of the big search engines before Google), published a short paper pointing out that search research rested on a bad assumption: that everyone searching was looking for information.
Plenty of people wanted to reach one particular site, or to get something done, like shopping or downloading a file.
His sample of AltaVista’s search logs backed that up: 48% of searches were informational, 20% were navigational and 30% were transactional.
Half the searches weren’t people looking something up.
The SEO industry later split a fourth type out of transactional, which is commercial, for people comparing options before they buy. That’s the set most SEO tools use to label keywords today.
Google uses its own labels, of course. Its search quality rater guidelines, the handbook for the people who rate Google’s results, sort intent into Know (with Know Simple for quick facts), Do, Website and Visit-in-person. Know is informational, Website is navigational, Do is close to transactional, and Visit-in-person is local. There’s no commercial bucket at all.
I’d treat the four types as a handy way to think about a search and not get hung up on which box a keyword belongs in.
What decides the page you need is what Google shows for it.
Informational keywords
The person wants to learn something or fix a problem.
- how to make espresso: 12,000
- how to clean espresso machine: 1,100
- why is my espresso bitter: 500
- what is a portafilter: 450
Guides, videos and forum threads rank for these. They rarely lead to a sale that day, but they’re how a lot of people find a brand long before they’re ready to buy. These are also the type of keywords that AI has the best chance of answering correctly.
Navigational keywords
The person wants a specific site or page and uses Google to get there.
- nespresso: 711,000
- breville: 105,000
- breville customer service: 2,500
Unless you’re the brand, you mostly can’t win these, because Google puts the brand’s own site first. Your own navigational keywords matter, though. If you’re not first for your own brand name, fix that before anything else.
Commercial keywords
The person is comparing options before buying. You’ll also see these called commercial investigation keywords.
- best espresso machine: 38,000
- breville vs delonghi: 1,300
- breville barista express review: 700
Google fills these results with reviews, comparisons, “best of” lists, Reddit threads and YouTube videos. Someone searching “breville vs delonghi” has narrowed it down to two brands, so they’re closer to buying than someone searching “espresso.”
Transactional keywords
The person is ready to buy, book or sign up.
- espresso machine: 341,000
- espresso machine with grinder: 9,100
- espresso machine sale: 1,000
- buy espresso machine: 250
The results here are mostly product pages, category pages and big retailers. “espresso machine” is on this list with no buying word in it, and the only way to know it belongs here is to look at what Google shows for it.
How to tell which type a keyword is
Google it. The results page shows you what Google has learned people want from that search, and it takes about ten seconds.
Keyword tools try to label intent for you, and they’re a fine starting point. Ahrefs tags “espresso machine” as informational, commercial and transactional all at once, which is accurate and not very useful. The results page is more decisive.
When I pulled the top results for three espresso keywords, this is what came back:
| Keyword | Searches/mo | What Google shows | Intent |
| espresso machine | 341,000 | Shopping carousels, an AI Overview, Amazon, retailer category pages, Breville’s own shop | Transactional |
| best espresso machine | 38,000 | An AI Overview, review sites like CoffeeGeek and Serious Eats, Reddit threads, YouTube, People Also Ask | Commercial |
| espresso machine repair near me | 900 | A map of local repair shops, Yelp, MapQuest, a local Reddit thread | Local and transactional |
“espresso machine” and “best espresso machine” are one word apart, and they need two different pages.
A store’s category page fits the first. The second wants reviews and comparisons, and a category page would look out of place there.
Some results pages are split, with a few shops and a few guides. That usually means the people searching want different things, and no tool can tell you which page to build. I’d build the kind of page your site is best at and model it on the result that looks most like it.
Head terms vs long-tail keywords
Head terms, also called short-tail keywords, are the broad searches lots of people make.
“espresso machine,” at 341,000 searches a month, is a head term. Long-tail keywords are the specific searches that each get only a few searches, like “breville barista express vs pro” at 150.
Long tail is about search volume, not length. A lot of guides say long-tail keywords are three words or more, but “best espresso machine for home” is five words and gets 25,000 searches a month. It isn’t long tail by any useful definition.
One niche, from the head down the tail:
| Keyword | Searches/mo |
| espresso machine | 341,000 |
| best espresso machine | 38,000 |
| best espresso machine for beginners | 1,800 |
| why is my espresso bitter | 500 |
| breville barista express vs pro | 150 |
The tail is much bigger than it looks from the top. Keywords with fewer than 10 searches a month make up almost 93% of the keywords in Ahrefs’ US database. Google has been repeating a related number for years. In 2017, it confirmed that 15% of the searches it sees every day have never been searched before.
No keyword tool can list those. You pick them up by covering a topic properly and knowing your audience well (ideally by talking to them). A page that answers the whole question ends up matching searches no keyword tool has on its list.
Long-tail keywords have three things going for them:
- They’re usually easier to rank for. Ahrefs gives “best espresso machine for beginners” a keyword difficulty of 6, against 21 for “espresso machine.”
- The person searching is clear about what they want. “best espresso machine for beginners” tells you who’s asking and what page to write. “espresso machine” could be someone shopping, someone browsing, or someone wondering what the thing even is.
- They’re closer to a decision. Someone searching “breville barista express vs pro” has already picked the machine and is choosing between two versions of it.
Head terms look like the prize, until you look at who you’d be up against.
Page one for “espresso machine” is shopping carousels, Amazon, big retailers and Breville’s own store. For a small store, that’s a long fight with some of the biggest retailers there are, and for a blog it’s the wrong kind of page altogether.
I’d start most sites in the tail. Rank for enough of it and you’ll have the traffic, links and pages that make a head term realistic later.
Branded vs non-branded (generic) keywords
Branded keywords include a brand name. Non-branded keywords, also called generic keywords, don’t.
- Branded: breville barista express (77,000), delonghi espresso machine (62,000)
- Generic: espresso machine (341,000), espresso machine with grinder (9,100)
Branded keywords split three ways, depending on whose brand it is:
- Your own brand. These are the navigational searches from earlier, from people who already know you.
- Brands you sell. A store that stocks Breville can rank for “breville barista express” with a product page, though it’s up against Breville itself and every big retailer.
- Competitor brands. “breville vs delonghi” (1,300) and “breville barista express review” (700) are commercial keywords with brand names in them. Reviews and comparisons rank here, and you don’t need to be either brand to win them.
The reason to keep branded and generic apart is reporting. Branded traffic comes from people who already know you, so it grows when your brand grows, whatever your SEO is doing. Lump the two together and a good month of word of mouth can hide a bad month of SEO.
Search Console made this much easier in November 2025, when Google added a branded queries filter that splits your searches into branded and non-branded automatically. The non-branded number is the one that tells you whether your SEO is working.
Local keywords
Local keywords are searches where the person wants something near them. Some say so outright:
- plumber near me: 435,000
- emergency plumber near me: 94,000
- plumber austin: 1,100
- espresso machine repair near me: 900
Others don’t mention a place at all. Plain “plumber” (337,000) gets local results anyway, since nobody wants a plumber from three states away.
When I pulled its results with the location set to Wichita, the top of the page was a map with three Wichita plumbers, and the regular results under it were local plumbing companies, Yelp and the Better Business Bureau.
That map, the local pack, is built from Google Business Profiles. So local keywords are a Google Business Profile job as much as a website job.
Your site still matters for the regular results underneath, and a page for each service you offer gives Google something to match those searches to.
Seasonal, trending and evergreen keywords
This sort is about timing. Evergreen keywords get about the same number of searches all year, like “how to make espresso” (12,000).
Seasonal keywords spike at the same time every year, like “espresso machine black friday” (3,000) or “pumpkin spice latte” (23,000). Trending keywords spike once, usually because of news or a viral product, and then fade.
Seasonal keywords are where search volume misleads you the most. The number a keyword tool shows is a monthly average, and Ahrefs lists “espresso machine black friday” at 3,000 searches a month. Its month-by-month data shows 28,372 searches in November 2025 and 63 in February 2026.
About 80% of the last 12 months’ searches came in November alone.
So for seasonal keywords:
- Publish a few weeks before the spike, so Google has time to find and rank the page.
- Keep the same URL every year (/espresso-machine-black-friday/, not /black-friday-2026/) and update the page instead of making a new one. The rankings and links carry over.
Google Trends is the free way to check whether a keyword is seasonal before you plan around it.
Question keywords
Question keywords are searches phrased as questions: how, what, why, which, can, does. They’re almost always informational.
- how much does a plumber cost: 2,800
- how to descale breville barista express: 1,100
- why is my espresso bitter: 500
- what is a portafilter: 450
The easiest place to find them is the People Also Ask box in Google’s results. The results for “best espresso machine” included “Is DeLonghi or Breville better?”, which is a comparison keyword phrased as a question.
Keyword tools have a questions filter too, and Google’s autocomplete suggests more as you type.
Where a question goes depends on the answer. If it takes a sentence or two, put it on the page that already covers that topic, often in a FAQ. If it takes a whole page to answer properly, like “how to descale breville barista express,” give it its own page.
High-CPC keywords
CPC, or cost per click, is what advertisers pay Google each time someone clicks their ad. It’s a Google Ads number, but it’s useful for SEO because it shows what a click from that search is worth to the businesses bidding on it.
| Keyword | Searches/mo | CPC |
| mesothelioma lawyer | 4,200 | $25.00 |
| emergency plumber | 122,000 | $20.00 |
| 24 hour plumber | 17,000 | $17.00 |
| burst pipe | 2,100 | $15.00 |
| insurance | 319,000 | $13.00 |
| plumber near me | 435,000 | $7.00 |
| how much does a plumber cost | 2,800 | $3.50 |
| how to unclog a toilet | 59,000 | $0.03 |
A plumbing company gets far more from ranking for “burst pipe” than for “how to unclog a toilet,” even though the toilet one gets almost 30 times the searches.
Advertisers pay 3 cents a click for it because the person searching wants to fix it themselves. “burst pipe” costs $15 a click because the person searching has water coming through the ceiling and needs a plumber now.
Treat CPC as a rough signal. The numbers differ a lot between tools and by location, so use them to compare one keyword against another. A high CPC also means the ads above the organic results are well funded, and those ads push the regular results further down the page.
Seed, primary and secondary keywords
This sort is about the job a keyword does, in your research and on your page.
A seed keyword is where your research starts. It is the broad term you type into a keyword tool, like “espresso” (99,000) or “espresso machine.” Every espresso keyword in this article grew out of a seed like that.
A primary keyword is the main keyword a page targets. Each page gets one. It decides what the page is about.
Secondary keywords are the close variants and subtopics that belong on the same page. They get covered naturally when the page answers the main search properly.
You can run this test without a tool. Google both keywords and compare the top 10. If several of the same pages show up for both, they belong on one page.
How many keywords should a page target?
One primary keyword, plus the variants that share its results. You don’t have to target the rest yourself, because a good page picks them up on its own. The best data on this is an Ahrefs study of 3 million searches, which found the average #1 page also ranked in the top 10 for nearly 1,000 other keywords, and the median page for around 400.
You don’t need to squeeze 50 keywords into a page. Answer the main search well and the rest come with it.
LSI keywords don’t exist
“LSI keywords” is what a lot of tools and guides call the related words you’re supposed to sprinkle into a page. LSI, or latent semantic indexing, is an information retrieval method from the late 1980s, and Google doesn’t use it. John Mueller from Google put it bluntly in 2019: “There’s no such thing as LSI keywords.”
Related words still end up on a good page. A page about descaling a Breville will mention descaling solution, the water tank and the steam wand anyway, because you can’t explain it without them.
How to use keywords on a page
Keyword optimization mostly means putting your primary keyword in the places Google and readers expect to see it:
- Title tag: the blue link in Google’s results.
- H1: the main heading on the page.
- URL: short, like /types-of-keywords/.
- First paragraph: early, in a sentence that reads naturally.
- Subheadings: some of them, where it fits.
- Meta description: it doesn’t affect rankings, but it’s often the text people read under your link before they click.
- Image alt text: only when it describes the image.
On WordPress, the title tag and meta description are set per page in your SEO plugin, whether that’s The SEO Framework, Yoast or Rank Math. The URL is the slug, which you can edit in the page settings. Past those spots, write the page the way you’d explain the topic to someone in person.
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is cramming keywords into a page to try to rank, and Google’s spam policies list it by name. Google’s examples include blocks of text listing every city a page wants to rank in, and repeating the same words so often it sounds unnatural. It’s the one way keyword placement can actively hurt you.
The meta keywords tag
The meta keywords tag is a line of HTML where you list a page’s keywords. Google settled this in a 2009 blog post titled “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.”
I’d leave it empty. Filling it in only hands your keyword list to anyone who looks at your page source.
Which keyword types to focus on first
It depends on what kind of site you have.
If you have an online store, you should start with transactional and commercial keywords.
Category pages go after product-type keywords like “espresso machine with grinder,” which gets 9,100 searches a month and has a keyword difficulty of 2 out of 100 in Ahrefs.
Product pages go after the branded names of what you sell, and comparisons and “best” guides go after the commercial searches. My eCommerce keyword research guide walks through this step by step.
Every local service business needs to start with local keywords. Get your Google Business Profile right, build a page for each service you offer, and put the high-CPC services first, since “emergency plumber” is worth far more per visit than “how to unclog a toilet.”
Question keywords like “how much does a plumber cost” (2,800) catch people right before they call someone.
When it comes to blog or content sites, they usually start with long-tail informational and commercial keywords. They’re easier to rank for, and a site full of them earns the traffic and links that make bigger keywords realistic later.
And whatever you work on next, Google the keyword before you build anything for it. The results page tells you the intent, the competition and the kind of page that wins, and it’s free.