Keyword research for freelance SEOs: research, save, track
If you're running SEO for more than one client, keyword research isn't one task — it's the same task repeated under different constraints. Here's the loop we build the product around.
If you're running SEO for more than one client, "do keyword research" isn't one task — it's the same task repeated under different constraints, for different budgets, different competitors, different definitions of success. Most tools give you one workspace and expect you to keep the client boundaries straight yourself, usually in a spreadsheet, usually badly.
This is the loop we build the product around: research → save → track, repeated per client, without the client contexts bleeding into each other.
The three-step loop
Research. Start from a seed keyword — the client's core service, product, or topic — and find what's actually worth targeting. Resist the urge to research broad and sort later; every pull costs something, and deciding what "worth targeting" means before you start protects both your time and your credit balance.
Save into a project. A project is one client, one site, nothing else. The moment research results live in a spreadsheet instead of a structured project, you've recreated the exact stitching-together problem freelancers describe — GSC in one tab, a point tool in another, a spreadsheet trying to be the source of truth for both.
Track. Set up recurring rank checks against the saved keywords and let them run. This is what turns research into a story you can tell a client instead of a one-time deliverable that goes stale the week after you send it. Scheduled tracking runs on keyword slots, never your credit balance — research and tracking are two different bills on purpose.
Why per-client separation matters more than most tools admit
The failure mode for freelancers running several client sites isn't "I don't know how to do keyword research." It's "I did the research, but I can't cleanly reconstruct which keywords belonged to which client, what the baseline was, or what's actually moved." A tool built around one global keyword list — the default shape for most SEO software, because most SEO software is built for an in-house team on one site — makes this worse, not better.
What this looks like end to end
- New client onboards. Create a project for their site.
- Pull one or two seed keywords from their core offering; research from there.
- Save the keywords worth targeting directly into that project as you go.
- Turn on weekly (or daily, for competitive terms) rank checks against the saved set.
- When it's reporting time, the project already has the history.
The cost side of this maps cleanly onto the two-currency split described in plans vs credits: tracking (step 4) draws down a fixed keyword-slot pool that doesn't move based on how much research you did that month, and research (steps 1-3) is the only thing metered, with the cost shown before you click.
See what a project actually costs to run at your own client volume on the pricing calculator.