The fishing guide keyword list

Type redfish into the federal taxonomic register and you get ten matches, three of which carry that exact name. None of them is the fish a Gulf angler means.

The bare name resolves to species called Trachichthodes affinis, Centroberyx affinis and Sebastes viviparus. The fish everybody in Texas and Louisiana is actually searching for is recorded there as red drum, Sciaenops ocellatus, and the register lists no English common name of redfish for it at all. That gap between the word people type and the word the authorities use is the entire keyword problem in this trade, and it is far more interesting than any list of phrases somebody could sell you. Related material is grouped on the getting-booked hub.

What is keyword research, formally?

Identifying the words your audience uses, which is not the same as the correct words.

Google's own definition is the practice of identifying the words and phrases your audience uses to search for the information you offer.

Note what that definition does not say. It says nothing about the words being accurate, official, or the ones you would use professionally.

For most trades that distinction never arises, because the customer and the trade use the same vocabulary.

Fishing is one of the exceptions, and coastal fishing especially so, because the same animal carries a regional name, a taxonomic name and a regulatory name.

A guide who writes the professional name is writing for a reader who searched something else.

A guide who writes only the local name has no page that matches the regulation a client is reading.

The documentation is published as Google's guide to getting started with Trends.

Fly Fish Sarasota, FL

What does the tool actually provide?

A sample, and the documentation says so plainly.

Trends is described as providing a random sample of aggregated, anonymised and categorised searches from Google and YouTube, allowing analysis of interest in a query or topic from global down to city-level geography.

Random sample is the phrase to hold on to, because it means the shapes are informative and the absolute numbers are not.

The documentation describes two tools: an explore tool for custom terms, their regional interest and related topics over time, and a trending tool for what is rising now, with an approximate search volume and related news.

The explore tool accepts up to five terms at once, which is a real constraint when a species has four names.

Its related cards can be set to top, meaning what people are most interested in, or rising, meaning what has been getting more attention lately.

That second setting is where the useful material usually is for a small operation, because rising terms are by definition less contested.

The wider search foundations are described in the search fundamentals piece.

What does the taxonomic register say?

One accepted English name, and it is not the popular one.

The federal taxonomic system holds a record for each species with a serial number, a scientific name and the common names recorded against it.

Queried on 26 July 2026, the record numbered 169290 resolves to the species Sciaenops ocellatus, in the genus Sciaenops, the family Sciaenidae and the suborder Percoidei.

The common names listed against that record are red drum in English and corvineta ocelada in Spanish.

Redfish does not appear among them.

Which is not an error in the register. It is a record of formal usage, and formal usage differs from what a person types into a phone at seven in the morning.

Both are true at once, and a guide's site has to accommodate both.

The register is published at the Integrated Taxonomic Information System.

So what does redfish resolve to?

Three other species, none of them the one in question.

Searching that register for the common name redfish on the same date returned ten matches.

Seven are compound names such as golden redfish, Acadian redfish, deepwater redfish and Mediterranean redfish.

Three carry the bare word on its own, and they resolve to Trachichthodes affinis, Centroberyx affinis and Sebastes viviparus.

Not one of the ten is Sciaenops ocellatus.

So the most searched fishing word on the Gulf coast points, in the authoritative register, at fish from entirely different families in entirely different oceans.

That is not a problem to solve. It is a fact to design around, and the design is simple: use both names on the same page, in the same sentence, once.

How that sentence should be built into a page is covered in the on-page basics piece.

What does the regulation call it?

Red drum, which is a third register agreeing with the second.

The federal reef fish rules carry a subpart devoted to the red drum fishery of the Gulf, using the formal common name throughout.

A client reading the rules before a trip encounters red drum. A client searching for a trip types redfish. Both are the same person, twenty minutes apart.

Which means a page that uses only one of the two names is failing one of those two moments.

The practical instruction is to lead with the searched name and carry the formal name once, in a sentence where it reads naturally rather than as a keyword.

Something like naming the fish as redfish and noting that the regulations call it red drum accomplishes both in nine words.

Confirm the current rules for your own fishery before writing anything about limits or seasons, since these provisions are amended and differ by region.

The subpart sits on eCFR.

Lakeside, TX

Why does the topics feature matter here?

Because it does the name-collapsing for you.

The documentation distinguishes between search terms and topics, and says topics aggregate across languages and include misspellings, variations and acronyms related to them.

For a trade whose vocabulary is full of regional variants and creative spellings, that is the more useful of the two views.

It means you can assess interest in the fish rather than in one particular string of letters, which is what you actually want to know.

The term view remains useful for deciding exactly which words to write, since a page has to contain actual words rather than concepts.

Use the topic view to decide whether a species deserves a page, and the term view to decide what that page calls it.

Those are two different questions and conflating them is why most keyword lists are longer than they need to be.

The pages that result are described in the piece on place pages.

Where does a guide's list start?

With what you already rank for, which is free.

The documentation suggests that if you are unsure what keywords to start with, you can check the performance report in Search Console, whose queries tab shows terms you already rank for and terms people click when visiting your site.

That is real data about your own site rather than a national sample, and it costs nothing beyond having verified the site.

It is also usually surprising, because the terms bringing people in are rarely the ones an operator would have guessed.

Start there, add the names you know clients use on the phone, and only then open the sampling tool.

That order matters, since starting with the tool produces a list about the country and starting with the report produces a list about you.

The verification that unlocks the report is covered in the local search piece.

What about place names?

The same problem, in a second dimension.

Water carries a formal name in the federal register of geographic names and a different name in local use, exactly as the fish does.

A bay may be one thing on a chart, another on the road sign, and a third in what everybody actually calls it.

The rule is the same: lead with what a client would type, carry the formal name once so a stranger can place it, and never invent a third version.

What that means for a keyword list is that the place dimension roughly doubles rather than multiplying, because a single sentence can hold both names.

Resist the urge to build a page per name variant, since near-identical pages collapse into one during indexing.

One page, both names, is the whole answer.

The naming register behind all this is discussed in the piece on tags and place names.

What about seasonality?

It decides timing rather than content.

The documentation suggests using the data to find seasonal trends and to plan ahead, so high quality content is available a little before people start searching for it.

It also warns that trends differ across markets and that different regions should be analysed separately.

For a guide the seasonality is unusually strong and unusually predictable, since the run happens at roughly the same time each year.

Which means the content for a species should be published before its season rather than during it, when the operator is least available to write.

The documentation is also blunt about the limit: you should not write about something purely because it is trending, and it points to its own content guidance for the test.

That caution applies with force here, because the trending fishing topic nationally is usually irrelevant to one stretch of water.

The publishing rhythm this implies is set out in the content calendar piece.

Does this happen with other species?

Constantly, and the register will tell you in a minute each.

Almost every fish a guide sells carries at least two names, and often a third that only exists within fifty miles of one bay.

Speckled trout, spotted seatrout and specks are the same animal to a client and three different strings to a search engine.

Sheepshead, convict fish and bay snapper travel together in the same way, and the local one changes with the coastline.

The way to settle each case is the same as the one worked through above: look the species up, write down what the register calls it, then write down what your clients call it.

Where those differ, the page needs both, and where they differ regionally, the page needs the one your clients use plus the formal one.

That is five minutes per species, done once, and it produces a list you can hand to anybody writing for you.

It also prevents the opposite failure, which is a site full of formal names nobody local would ever say aloud.

What about the words that are not species?

Four categories, and they behave differently.

Trip formats, meaning the words for what is being sold, which clients express in duration and party size rather than in technique.

Water and place names, which carry the same dual-name problem as species and are handled the same way.

Timing words, meaning the month or the season, which people attach to a species when planning rather than when booking.

And qualifying words such as beginner, family, or accessible, which describe the client rather than the fishing and are the most neglected of the four.

That last category is worth attention because it captures somebody who has not decided what to fish for yet, which is an earlier and less contested moment.

A page about taking children out is competing with far less than a page about a species everybody targets.

None of those four is discoverable from a species list, which is why a keyword exercise built only on fish names comes out incomplete.

The trip formats themselves are enumerated in the services piece.

Where do guides go wrong here?

Seven ways, and the first is buying a list.

Paying for a keyword list assembled nationally, which describes the country rather than your bay.

Using only the formal species name, so nobody searching the local one finds the page.

Using only the local name, so the page never matches the regulation a client is reading.

Building a page per name variant, which produces near-identical pages that collapse into one.

Chasing a nationally trending fishing topic that has nothing to do with the water you work.

Never opening the performance report, which is the only source that describes your own site.

And treating sampled index numbers as though they were volumes, when the documentation describes a random sample.

What such a list is worth to an agency selling it is examined in the directories piece.

What surprises people here?

That the fish has an official name and it is not the one they use.

Most guides have never looked their target species up in a taxonomic register, and the result is usually a small shock.

The second surprise is that the popular name points at unrelated species in that register, which is a fact rather than an opinion about usage.

The third is that the tool provides a sample rather than a count, which invalidates a great deal of confident argument about volumes.

The fourth is that the topic view already merges misspellings and variants, so building pages for misspellings is unnecessary.

The fifth is that the best starting data is your own performance report, which most operations have never opened.

None of that requires a subscription, and all of it takes an afternoon.

The markup that describes those pages is covered in the schema markup piece.

What list should you end up with?

Short, local, and organised by page rather than by phrase.

One line per page you intend to have, rather than one line per phrase you would like to rank for.

Against each, the searched name and the formal name for whatever it is about, both of which will appear in the text.

Against each, the town or water it belongs to, in the words clients use.

And against each, the month you intend to publish or refresh it, taken from the season rather than from a content plan.

Ten to fourteen lines is a complete list for most operations, and it fits on one page.

Anything longer is describing a business larger than the one you have.

The links those pages might eventually earn are discussed in the backlinks piece.

How would you check it?

Four steps, an afternoon, no purchase required.

Look up each species you target in the taxonomic register and write down the scientific name and every recorded common name.

Write beside them the names your clients actually use on the phone, which you already know.

Open the performance report and read the queries tab, noting anything you would not have predicted.

Then put the handful of candidate terms into the sampling tool, five at a time, and look at the shapes rather than the numbers.

What survives all four is your list, and it will be shorter than anything anybody would sell you.

Do it once a year, since neither the species nor the seasons change quickly.

The writing that fills those pages is described in the blogging piece.

The list, in order

Both names, your own data first, one page per thing.

Look the species up formally, and accept that the official name and the searched name differ.

Write both on the same page, in one natural sentence, and never build a separate page for the variant.

Start from your own performance report rather than from a national sample.

Use the topic view to decide what deserves a page and the term view to decide what that page says.

Treat the numbers as shapes, because the documentation describes the underlying data as a random sample.

Publish before the season rather than during it.

Ignore anything trending nationally that has nothing to do with your water.

And keep the whole list to a single page, because a longer one describes somebody else's business.