Top Keywords: What people search for and how to use it

To see what people search for most, open Top Keywords. It lists 596 keywords, grouped into 33 everyday topics such as Food and Cooking, Money and Finance, Travel and Transportation, and Health and Medical Care. Each keyword shows how many times a month people search for it worldwide, and each topic starts with its biggest search.

It's free, and you don't need an account. Click any keyword to open a full keyword page with its numbers, the Google results and related keyword ideas.

Use it to find where demand is in your area of business. Then check the few keywords that fit you in your own market before you plan pages around them.

Read the list: Topics, volume and order

The page has a list of the 33 topics, each with its number of keywords. Pick a topic to see only its keywords, or stay on All topics to scroll through everything. A search box finds a keyword or a topic by name, so typing "insurance" brings up the insurance searches.

Each topic opens with a one-line description, then its keywords, highest volume first. The number beside each keyword is its worldwide monthly search volume, shortened (226.0m means about 226 million searches a month).

Keep three things in mind as you read:

• It's a chosen set, not every search. The list covers broad, everyday topics. Your niche may only show up as one or two keywords, or not at all.
• It's one list in English. The page doesn't split the list by country. For a market in another language, translate the keywords before you check them.
• The top of each topic is the broadest. Searches like "restaurants" or "weather" are huge but say little about what the searcher wants. The smaller, more specific keywords further down are often the ones a business can use.

What you see when you open a keyword

Every keyword on the list links to its own keyword page, free and with no account. The page shows:

• Search volume, CPC (cost per click: what advertisers pay for a click on their ad) and CPC competition (how strongly advertisers compete for the search) in the United States, with a monthly chart.
• The same three numbers worldwide.
• A worldwide monthly trend, with the change from a year earlier.
• Keyword difficulty from 0 to 100, an estimate of how hard it is to rank for the search: easy (under 30), medium (30 to 59) or hard (60 and up).
• The Google results: the ranking pages, plus related searches and the questions people ask, where Google shows them.
• The age and gender of the people who search for it, where we have that data.
• Up to 50 keyword suggestions for the United States, which you can sort and filter by volume, difficulty, CPC, competition and intent.

For planning, start with the Google results. They show what kind of page wins for the search, for example recipes, shops or news. That tells you what kind of page you'd have to build.

Check the numbers for your own market

A keyword from the Top Keywords list always shows United States numbers on its keyword page. That's true even when you're signed in, and even when you look it up in the keyword research tool. The list's numbers are worldwide, like the keyword page's worldwide figures. If your customers are somewhere else, check your shortlist in your own country. Seonio has keyword data for 50 countries.

You have two ways to do that. Both are paid from your Seonio balance, so they need an account. A verified account gets a free $1 to test, valid for 30 days, with no subscription or payment method needed. Create a free account.

• To check a whole list at once, use the keyword metrics by country endpoint. It takes up to 500 keywords and one country. It returns each keyword's search volume, CPC range, competition, difficulty, intent and the last 12 months of volume. It costs $0.01 per request plus $0.001 for each started block of 10 keywords. You can call it through the REST API, or ask ChatGPT, Claude or another assistant connected through Seonio's MCP server.
• To check one keyword that isn't on the Top Keywords list, open it in the keyword research tool. It uses the default market you set in Settings.

Spot what's growing with Trending Keywords

Top Keywords shows how big a search is. Trending Keywords shows which of the same keywords are growing fastest. It ranks up to 100 of them by their growth since January 2023, with each keyword's monthly volume and a small chart of its monthly history. It only lists keywords that have grown. It's free too, with no account.

Use the two together. A keyword that's big on Top Keywords and also on Trending Keywords has demand now, and more of it than in January 2023.

Example: From a topic to a page plan

This is an example to show the steps. It isn't a real business or an observed result.

Say you run a small meal-kit company in Canada and want to know what to write about.

1. Open the topic that fits. Food and Cooking lists 13 keywords. "Restaurants", "coffee" and "grocery store" are at the top, but they're not your customers' searches. Further down are "meal prep" (165,000 a month), "meal planning" (90,500) and "meal kits" (22,200). Those match what you sell.
2. Look at who ranks. Open the "meal prep" keyword page and look at the Google results. Are they recipe posts, meal-kit shops or news? Check the questions people ask, too. Each one could be a section or an article.
3. Pick ideas that show buying. In the keyword suggestions on the same page, filter by commercial and transactional intent. Those searchers are closer to buying than people looking for a recipe.
4. Check your market. Put your shortlist of, say, 20 keywords into the keyword metrics by country endpoint for Canada. That's $0.01 plus 2 × $0.001, so $0.012. Drop the keywords with little search volume in Canada.
5. Decide which searches share a page. First set your market in Settings to Canada, because keyword clustering in the app uses it. Then run keyword clustering on "meal prep" ($0.25 a request). It groups keywords that share the same ranking pages, so you can cover each group with one page instead of writing a page per keyword.

Both paid steps together cost $0.262, which fits inside the free $1.

Where to start

Open Top Keywords, pick the topic closest to your business and scan past the biggest searches to the specific ones. Open those keyword pages to see who ranks. When you're ready to check your own market, sign up for the free $1.