Growth Keywords: What You Target Reveals What You Believe About Growth
Growth keywords are the search terms a business deliberately targets to reach audiences who are not yet customers, not just those already looking to buy. They sit above the transactional layer of search, in the territory where markets are made rather than captured.
Most keyword strategies are really demand-capture strategies wearing growth clothing. They optimise for the bottom of the funnel, measure what converts, and call it growth. It is not. Growth means reaching people who did not know they needed you yet, and keyword strategy is one of the clearest places where that ambition either shows up or does not.
Key Takeaways
- Growth keywords target audiences who are not yet in-market, not those already searching to buy. Most keyword strategies skip this entirely.
- Optimising purely for transactional, high-intent terms captures existing demand. It does not create new demand or expand your addressable market.
- The funnel shape of your keyword portfolio tells you what you actually believe about growth, regardless of what your strategy deck says.
- Category-level and problem-aware keywords tend to outperform branded and solution-aware terms for long-run market share, even when they convert more slowly.
- Keyword strategy is a commercial decision, not an SEO decision. It belongs in go-to-market planning, not just the content calendar.
In This Article
- Why Most Keyword Strategies Are Not Growth Strategies
- What Growth Keywords Actually Look Like
- The Funnel Shape of Your Keyword Portfolio Tells the Truth
- How to Identify Growth Keywords in Practice
- The Commercial Case for Upper-Funnel Keyword Investment
- Where Keyword Strategy Fits in Go-To-Market Planning
- Common Mistakes in Growth Keyword Strategy
Why Most Keyword Strategies Are Not Growth Strategies
Early in my career, I was as guilty of this as anyone. I was running performance programmes where the entire keyword architecture was built around what converted. High commercial intent, tight match types, aggressive negative lists. The numbers looked excellent. Cost per acquisition was low, return on ad spend was high, and everyone in the room felt like they were winning.
What I did not appreciate at the time was how much of that performance was simply capturing people who were already going to buy. We were not growing the market. We were standing at the exit of a funnel someone else had built, collecting the people who had already made up their minds. The brand, the product, the word of mouth, the category awareness, all of that had done the heavy lifting. We were just the last click.
It took years of working across enough categories, and enough Effie submissions where the data told a more complicated story than the campaign narrative, to really reckon with this. Performance marketing is often credited for outcomes it did not cause. And keyword strategy, particularly in SEO, tends to replicate the same bias: optimise for what converts, ignore what grows.
If you want to understand where keyword strategy fits within a broader commercial framework, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the structural thinking that should sit underneath any channel-level decision, including search.
What Growth Keywords Actually Look Like
Growth keywords are not a single type of term. They are a posture toward search that prioritises market expansion over demand capture. In practice, they tend to fall into a few distinct categories.
The first is problem-aware keywords. These are terms where someone knows they have a problem but has not yet identified a solution category. A business owner searching “why are my sales slowing down” is not looking for your CRM. But if your content meets them there and frames the problem well, you have entered their consideration set before the category search even happens.
The second is category-education keywords. These are searches that define or explain a space: “what is demand generation”, “how does programmatic advertising work”, “difference between brand and performance marketing”. The people searching these terms are not ready to buy. They are building a mental model of a market. If your content shapes that model, you have a structural advantage when they do reach the decision stage.
The third is adjacent-audience keywords. These target people in a related role, industry, or situation who are not yet your typical customer but represent a realistic expansion opportunity. A B2B SaaS company that has saturated its core IT-buyer audience might find growth by targeting operations leaders or finance teams who share adjacent pain points.
None of these convert at the same rate as “buy [product] online”. That is the point. They are not supposed to. They are building the pipeline that performance marketing will eventually harvest, and the failure to invest in them is why so many businesses hit a growth ceiling and cannot work out why.
The Funnel Shape of Your Keyword Portfolio Tells the Truth
I have a simple diagnostic I use when I look at a keyword strategy for the first time. I ask: what does the shape of this portfolio tell me about what this business believes?
If 80% of the target terms are transactional or branded, that business believes its job is to close people who are already in motion. It is not wrong, but it is not growth. It is maintenance.
If the portfolio has meaningful investment in informational, problem-aware, and category-level terms, that business is betting on building awareness and shaping consideration before the purchase decision forms. That is a growth posture.
The ratio matters. There is no universally correct split. A mature category with high brand awareness and strong direct demand can afford to weight toward transactional terms. A new entrant, a challenger brand, or a business trying to grow into adjacent segments needs a fundamentally different balance.
When I was leading the growth of an agency from around 20 people to close to 100, one of the things that changed our new business pipeline was shifting how we thought about the content we published. We had been writing for clients, not for prospects. When we started targeting the questions that prospective clients were asking before they even knew they needed an agency, the quality and volume of inbound shifted noticeably. The keywords were not competitive in the traditional sense. But they were meeting the right people at the right moment in their thinking.
How to Identify Growth Keywords in Practice
The mechanics of identifying growth keywords are not complicated. What is complicated is the commercial judgement required to prioritise them when they do not show immediate returns.
Start with your current customer base and work backwards. What did your best customers believe before they found you? What problems were they trying to solve? What language were they using before they learned your category’s vocabulary? Those earlier-stage questions are often where growth keywords live.
Then look at search volume data with a different lens. Most keyword tools are optimised to surface high-volume, high-intent terms. That is useful for demand capture. For growth keywords, you are often looking at lower-volume terms with strong topical relevance and low competition, the kind of terms that a well-resourced competitor has not yet bothered with because the immediate commercial signal is weak.
Tools like SEMrush are useful here for understanding market penetration and identifying the gaps between where you currently rank and where your audience’s attention actually sits. The gap analysis is more instructive than the volume data on its own.
Look at what your competitors are not targeting. If everyone in your category is fighting over the same twenty high-intent terms, the growth opportunity is almost certainly in the surrounding territory. The terms that define the problem before the solution category becomes relevant. The terms that speak to the adjacent audiences your competitors have not yet addressed.
Also look at search intent shifts over time. Categories evolve. The way people search for solutions in a given space changes as the market matures, as new entrants reframe the problem, as technology shifts the vocabulary. Tracking those shifts is not just an SEO exercise. It is market intelligence.
The Commercial Case for Upper-Funnel Keyword Investment
The hardest conversation in any marketing planning cycle is the one where you argue for investment that will not show returns in the next quarter. Growth keywords are almost always that conversation.
The commercial case is not complicated in principle, but it requires a longer measurement frame than most organisations are comfortable with. If you reach someone at the problem-aware stage and shape their understanding of the category, you have a structural advantage in every subsequent touchpoint. Your brand is already in their mental model. Your framing of the problem is already their reference point. When they do reach the decision stage, you are not starting from zero.
Think about it like a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who walks past the window. Growth keywords are the equivalent of getting people through the door and into the fitting room, before they have decided they are shopping. That is a different kind of conversion, but it is no less real in its commercial effect.
BCG’s work on commercial transformation in go-to-market strategy makes a similar point about where value is actually created in the purchase experience. The upstream stages of consideration and awareness are where market share is won or lost. The downstream stages are where it is confirmed.
Forrester’s intelligent growth model also argues for a more structured approach to where growth investment goes, distinguishing between defending existing share and genuinely expanding the addressable market. Keyword strategy is one of the most direct levers available for that expansion, when it is used with that intent.
The measurement challenge is real. Growth keywords do not produce clean last-click attribution. They contribute to outcomes that get credited elsewhere. That is not an argument against them. It is an argument for better measurement frameworks, ones that account for assisted conversions, time-to-purchase, and the effect of content on consideration rather than just on clicks.
Where Keyword Strategy Fits in Go-To-Market Planning
This is the point most SEO conversations miss entirely. Keyword strategy is a commercial decision. It reflects choices about which markets you want to compete in, which audiences you want to reach, and which problems you are positioning yourself to solve. Those are not SEO decisions. They are go-to-market decisions.
When I was at Cybercom, in the early days of my agency career, I sat in a brainstorm for Guinness where the founder handed me the whiteboard pen and walked out to take a client call. I was new. The room was full of people who knew the brand far better than I did. My instinct was to defer. Instead, I started asking the most basic commercial question I could think of: who are we trying to reach that we are not currently reaching? Everything that came out of that session that was worth keeping came from that question, not from the tactical execution ideas that had been circling before I picked up the pen.
Keyword strategy works the same way. Start with the commercial question. Who are we not reaching? What do they believe before they find us? What would they search for before they know we exist? The answers to those questions produce better keyword strategies than any amount of volume data or competitive analysis on its own.
The reason go-to-market feels harder now than it did five years ago is partly because the easy demand-capture plays are more saturated and more expensive. The growth opportunity has shifted upstream, into the territory where audiences are forming their understanding of a problem before they have decided to solve it. Keyword strategy, built around growth intent rather than conversion intent, is one of the most scalable ways to compete in that territory.
If you are building or reviewing a go-to-market plan and want a broader framework for thinking about growth levers, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is worth reading alongside this. Keyword strategy does not sit in isolation. It is one instrument in a larger commercial system.
Common Mistakes in Growth Keyword Strategy
The most common mistake is treating growth keywords as a content marketing exercise rather than a commercial one. Teams produce informational content to target upper-funnel terms, but the content is not connected to a clear commercial thesis about which audiences it is trying to move, or what the next step in their experience should be. The content gets traffic. It does not get customers.
The second mistake is measuring growth keywords against conversion metrics designed for transactional terms. If you apply a last-click CPA lens to content targeting problem-aware searchers, it will always look like it is underperforming. That is not a finding. That is a measurement error.
The third mistake is treating keyword research as a one-time exercise. Markets shift. The vocabulary people use to describe their problems evolves. A keyword strategy built two years ago may be targeting the language of a category that no longer exists in quite the same form. Regular review is not optional. Looking at how growth strategies evolve across different categories gives a useful sense of how quickly the search landscape can shift when a market is in motion.
The fourth mistake is siloing keyword strategy inside the SEO team. When keyword decisions are made without input from product, sales, and commercial leadership, they optimise for search metrics rather than business outcomes. The best keyword strategies I have seen were built in rooms that included people who understood the customer, the category, and the commercial model, not just the search data.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
