What makes for successful keyword research: part 2, making the choice

Part one covered the groundwork. This part is about choosing. Part three covers the common mistakes.

You should now have a long list of candidates. Twenty to fifty is normal. The job is narrowing it to a plan you can realistically execute and win.

Look at the actual results page first

Before assessing any keyword on volume or difficulty score, search it and look at what’s already there. This takes thirty seconds and it’ll save you months.

You’re looking for three things.

What kind of pages rank? If the whole first page is national retailers and your business is a local service, that keyword is telling you it doesn’t think you’re the answer. If the first page is local service businesses roughly your size, it does.

What does Google think the searcher wants? If a term you assumed was commercial returns ten explanatory articles, Google has decided that search is informational. You can’t out-rank an entire page of guides with a services page. Either match the intent or pick a different keyword.

How much room is left? Count the organic results above the fold. If the page opens with an AI summary, four ads, a map pack and a video carousel, the first organic result may be a long way down. Position three on that page is worth considerably less than position three on a clean one.

This last check has become significantly more important. Two keywords with identical volume can deliver wildly different traffic depending on how much of the page is left for organic listings.

Judge difficulty honestly

Every tool offers a difficulty score. Treat them as a rough guide, not an answer, because they mostly measure backlinks and ignore everything else.

Better questions:

• Are the ranking pages actually good, or merely old and well-linked? A weak page holding position on reputation alone is beatable. A genuinely excellent one isn’t, quickly.
• Do they cover the topic more thoroughly than you could?
• Are they large national brands? Those are hard to displace regardless of content quality.
• Is anything on that page more than a few years old and visibly stale?

If the answer is “these pages are mediocre and dated”, you have found an opportunity, whatever the difficulty score says.

Be realistic about where you’re

A new burger shop doesn’t outrank McDonald’s for “burgers”. This is obvious, and yet a great deal of money is spent ignoring it.

If your site is young, has few links and limited content, competing for the highest-volume head terms is a multi-year project. Meanwhile a portfolio of specific, lower-volume, high-intent terms can produce enquiries within months.

Win the terms you can win. The authority you accumulate doing that is what eventually makes the bigger terms possible. It works in that order and not the other one.

Learn from competitors, selectively

Competitor research is useful for finding what you have missed, not for copying a list.

Worth stealing: topics you haven’t covered. Questions they answer that you don’t. Service pages you lack. Terms they rank for accidentally.

Worth ignoring: their head terms, unless you have comparable authority. And anything ranking through tactics you wouldn’t want to be caught using.

Choose the right competitors, too. Your competitor for search purposes is whoever ranks for your keywords, which is frequently not who you compete with for customers. Directories, marketplaces and publishers often occupy the results, and they’re a different kind of opponent.

Think like the customer, not the business

Businesses describe themselves in industry language. Customers search in ordinary language, and the gap between the two is where a lot of traffic quietly goes missing.

Nobody searches for “integrated facilities management solutions”. They search for “office cleaning”.

Ways to close the gap:

• Read your own enquiry form submissions and note the words people use.
• Listen to what prospects say on the phone in the first thirty seconds.
• Ask recent customers what they typed when they were looking.
• Read reviews of your competitors. Customers describing a problem in their own words is exactly the raw material you need.

Your staff who answer the phone know these words already. Ask them.

Build a shortlist that’s a portfolio

Aim for fifteen to twenty targets, deliberately mixed:

• A few head terms. Hard, valuable, long-term. Two or three, not ten.
• A solid core of mid-tail terms. Specific enough to be winnable, big enough to matter. This is where most of the work should sit.
• A tail of very specific, high-intent phrases. Individually small, collectively significant, and often converting better than anything else.

Then map each one to a page. If a target has no page and no plan for one, it isn’t a target yet.

Next

Part three covers the mistakes that waste the most time and money, with examples.