Hello xplodetech,
As a SEO company which is working for more than 8 years now, we do not firstly focus on Keyword research. Instead, other factors relating to the layout of sites are taken care of. On page optimization consists of making your page in such a way that the user likes your page. If we do not have proper 301 redirects, if we do not have a fast load time on both desktop and mobile devices. If we do not have proper URLs and your site does not contain "robots.txt" and "sitemap.xml" then we have more things to worry about than Keyword research.
Keyword research comes at a later point of time.
Hope it helps !