How I Found 47 Keywords in 10 Minutes Without Doing Any Research

The old way of finding keywords

If you've ever done keyword research manually, you know the drill. Open Ahrefs or SEMrush. Type in a seed keyword. Export a spreadsheet. Filter by volume. Check difficulty. Cross-reference with Search Console. Open Google and check the SERPs. Copy keywords into another spreadsheet. Repeat for hours.

It works, but it's tedious — and for indie makers paying $130+/mo for SEO tools, it's an expensive kind of tedious.

We built unranked to make this process automatic. Here's what it looks like in practice.

Step 1: Enter your domain

After signing up, you'll see the setup screen. All it asks for is your domain.

That's it. No configuring data sources, no connecting APIs (though you can connect Google Search Console later for even better data). Just your domain.

Step 2: Sit back while discovery runs

Once you hit go, unranked starts three discovery processes in parallel:

1. Site crawl — scans your pages, extracts the topics you already cover, and identifies keywords you're naturally relevant for
2. Competitor analysis — finds sites that rank for similar terms and discovers keywords you're missing
3. GSC data (if connected) — pulls in keywords you're already getting impressions for, including ones you didn't intentionally target

This takes about 30–60 seconds depending on your site size. No manual input needed.

Step 3: Review your keywords

When discovery finishes, you'll see every keyword it found — with search volume, keyword difficulty (KD), and the source it was discovered from.

Each keyword is tagged with how it was found:

• Ranked — you already show up in Google for this term
• Competitor — a competitor ranks for this but you don't (yet)
• Suggested — extracted from your site content and matched to real search queries

This is where it gets interesting. The "Ranked" keywords often include terms you had no idea you were ranking for. Maybe position 15 for something you never targeted — those are striking distance opportunities waiting to be pushed to page one.

The "Competitor" keywords show you what you're missing. If three competitors rank for "open source project management" and you don't even have a page about it, that's a content gap.

Step 4: Pick your winners

You don't need to track everything. The goal is to select the keywords that matter most for your business — the ones with enough volume to be worth it, low enough difficulty to be winnable, and strong enough intent to drive signups or awareness.

A good filtering strategy:

• KD under 40 — actually achievable for a smaller site
• Volume over 100 — enough traffic to matter
• Business relevance — does ranking here help you?

The keywords you select become your tracked keywords. Unranked will check your position for each one weekly, show you trends over time, and flag when a keyword enters striking distance.

Step 5: Your dashboard comes alive

Once you've confirmed your keywords, the dashboard populates with your current positions, trends, and opportunities.

From here it's ongoing: every week, unranked checks where you rank for each keyword, flags movements, and highlights striking distance keywords that are close to breaking through to page one.

What I found in 10 minutes

When we ran this on a real indie SaaS site, discovery returned 47 keywords in under 2 minutes. Of those:

• 12 were terms the site was already ranking for (positions 8–50) that nobody had deliberately targeted
• 19 came from competitor analysis — keywords competitors rank for that the site had no content about
• 16 were extracted from the site's own content and matched to real search queries

After filtering for KD under 35 and volume over 50, we ended up with 23 keywords worth tracking. Three of them were striking distance (positions 11–15) with over 200 monthly searches each — the kind of quick wins where a content refresh and some internal links could get them to page one.

Total time from signup to having a prioritized, data-backed keyword strategy: about 10 minutes. No spreadsheets, no manual SERP analysis, no $130/mo tool subscription.

The shift: from research to execution

The bottleneck in SEO for most indie makers isn't knowledge — it's time. You know you should be doing keyword research. You know you should track your rankings. You know you should find striking distance keywords. But manually doing all of that while also building your product, handling support, and shipping features? Something has to give, and usually it's SEO.

Automated discovery flips the equation. Instead of spending 3 hours researching keywords before you can write a single piece of content, you spend 10 minutes confirming which keywords to track and then get straight to creating.

The research isn't gone — it's just handled for you.