Keywords and Phrases: What You’re Competing For

Keywords and phrases are the words and combinations of words that people type into search engines when they want something. Getting them right is not a technical exercise. It is a commercial one. The question is not which keywords get the most traffic. It is which keywords signal the kind of intent that connects to your actual business objectives.

Most keyword strategies fail because they optimise for volume rather than value. A term that generates 50,000 searches a month is worthless if none of those searchers are ever going to buy what you sell. Understanding the difference between traffic and demand, and between intent and proximity to purchase, is where keyword strategy either earns its keep or quietly wastes your budget.

Why Keyword Strategy Is a Commercial Problem, Not a Technical One

I spent years watching agencies treat keyword research as an SEO deliverable. A spreadsheet would land in the client’s inbox, colour-coded by volume and difficulty, and everyone would nod along as if the work was done. It rarely was. What those spreadsheets almost never captured was whether the people searching those terms were ever going to become customers.

Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance signals. If someone clicked on a branded search term and converted, the attribution model lit up green and we called it a win. What I came to understand much later was that a significant portion of that activity was going to happen regardless. The person searching your brand name already knew you existed. Capturing that intent is useful, but it is not growth. Growth means reaching people who are not yet in your consideration set, and keyword strategy is one of the primary mechanisms for doing that.

This reframing matters because it changes what you are looking for. Instead of asking which keywords have the highest volume, you start asking which keywords signal that someone is entering a buying process where you have a realistic chance of winning. That is a commercial question. It requires commercial thinking, not just technical tooling.

Keyword strategy also sits inside a broader go-to-market context. The terms you compete for should reflect your positioning, your audience segmentation, and your growth objectives. If those things are not clear, no amount of keyword research will fix the underlying problem. For a broader view of how keyword decisions connect to growth planning, the articles in Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy cover the surrounding framework in more depth.

The Difference Between Head Terms and Long-Tail Phrases

Head terms are short, high-volume keywords. “Marketing agency.” “Running shoes.” “Project management software.” They attract enormous search volume and are almost always dominated by well-resourced incumbents with years of domain authority behind them. For most businesses, competing for head terms on organic search alone is a slow and expensive strategy with an uncertain payoff.

Long-tail phrases are longer, more specific, and lower in volume. “Marketing agency for SaaS companies in the UK.” “Lightweight running shoes for wide feet.” “Project management software for remote construction teams.” These phrases convert at higher rates because they carry more intent. The person searching is further along in their thinking. They have already ruled out the generic answer and are looking for something specific.

The practical implication is that a keyword strategy built primarily around long-tail phrases will often outperform one built around head terms, particularly for businesses without the domain authority to compete at the top of crowded categories. This is not a new observation. But it is one that gets ignored repeatedly because head terms feel more impressive in a pitch deck.

There is also a middle tier worth paying attention to: mid-tail phrases. These sit between the extremes in terms of both specificity and volume. “Marketing agency for tech companies” is more specific than “marketing agency” but less specific than the SaaS example above. These terms often represent the best balance of reachable volume and meaningful intent, and they are frequently underserved in keyword strategies that focus on the two ends of the spectrum.

How Search Intent Should Drive Every Keyword Decision

Search intent describes what a person is actually trying to do when they type a query. There are four broad categories: informational (they want to learn something), navigational (they are looking for a specific website or brand), commercial investigation (they are comparing options before a decision), and transactional (they are ready to act).

The mistake most keyword strategies make is treating all search volume as equivalent. It is not. A thousand searches for “what is content marketing” and a thousand searches for “content marketing agency pricing” represent very different commercial opportunities. The first group is learning. The second group is buying. Building content and landing pages that match the right intent to the right stage of the funnel is where keyword strategy connects to actual revenue.

When I was at iProspect, we managed significant paid search budgets across dozens of categories. One of the most consistent findings was that campaigns built around intent-matched keyword groups consistently outperformed campaigns built around volume-matched keyword groups. The difference was not always dramatic in the short term, but over 12 months it compounded. The intent-matched campaigns attracted audiences who converted faster, retained longer, and required less retargeting spend to close.

Intent analysis also helps you identify where you should not be competing. Some keywords attract audiences who are never going to buy. Some attract competitors doing research. Some attract journalists or students. Spending budget or content effort on those terms is a cost with no return. Filtering for intent is how you stop that from happening.

The Gap Between What Customers Search and What Brands Think They Search

This gap is almost always larger than expected, and it is one of the most common sources of wasted keyword spend I have seen across 30 industries. Brands use their internal language. Customers use their own language. Those two vocabularies overlap less than most marketing teams assume.

A financial services client might build their keyword strategy around terms like “wealth management solutions” and “portfolio optimisation services.” Their customers search for “how to make my money work harder” and “what to do with a lump sum.” The intent is identical. The language is completely different. If your keyword strategy is built on your internal vocabulary rather than your customer’s vocabulary, you are invisible to the people you most want to reach.

Closing this gap requires real audience data. Behaviour analytics tools like Hotjar can surface how real users interact with your site and what language they use when they get there. Customer service transcripts, sales call recordings, and forum threads are often more valuable than any keyword tool for understanding how your audience actually talks about their problems. The keyword tools come later. They help you quantify and prioritise what the qualitative research has already identified.

I have also found that the best source of keyword intelligence in a business is often the sales team. They hear objections, questions, and comparisons every day. That vocabulary is gold. It is the raw material of a keyword strategy that actually maps to how real buyers think.

Competitive Keyword Analysis: What You Are Actually Looking For

Competitive keyword analysis is not about copying what your competitors are doing. It is about understanding where the competitive landscape creates opportunity and where it creates a trap.

The trap is bidding on or optimising for terms that your best-resourced competitors have already locked up. If a category leader has five years of domain authority, a large content team, and a significant paid search budget behind a set of head terms, you are not going to displace them by targeting the same keywords. You are going to spend money and time competing for a position you are unlikely to win.

The opportunity is the gap. What are your competitors ranking for where their content is weak? What terms are driving traffic to them where your product or service is actually stronger? What adjacent terms are they ignoring entirely? Tools like Semrush surface this kind of competitive intelligence at scale, but the analysis still requires human judgment to separate the genuinely useful from the noise.

There is also a strategic question about whether you want to compete head-on or position around the edges. In most markets, the edge is more profitable than the centre for challengers. The centre is where the incumbents are. The edge is where the specific, underserved demand sits. That is usually where a well-targeted keyword strategy can generate disproportionate returns relative to investment.

Understanding market penetration dynamics matters here too. If you are trying to grow share in a competitive category, the market penetration lens helps you identify which keyword clusters represent genuine acquisition opportunity versus which ones are already saturated.

Coordinating Paid and Organic Keyword Strategy

One of the most persistent structural problems I saw across agency leadership was paid search and SEO running as separate workstreams with separate keyword lists, separate reporting, and sometimes separate agencies. The result was duplication, conflicting signals, and missed opportunities on both sides.

Paid search data is one of the most valuable inputs available to an organic keyword strategy. When you run paid campaigns, you get real data on which keyword variations actually drive conversions, not just clicks. That data should be feeding directly into content and SEO planning. If a particular phrase consistently outperforms in paid, that is a signal worth investigating for organic investment.

The reverse is also true. Organic keyword data, particularly the search queries that bring people to your site through Google Search Console, tells you what language your actual visitors use. That is real-world validation of your keyword assumptions, and it should inform how you allocate paid budget.

The coordination question also applies to bidding strategy. There are terms where organic and paid presence together creates a disproportionate share of the search results page, reinforcing brand visibility and increasing the probability of a click. There are also terms where strong organic performance means paid spend is redundant. Knowing which is which requires the two channels to be talking to each other, ideally with shared reporting and a single point of accountability.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation in go-to-market strategy makes a similar point at a higher level: fragmented channel execution consistently underperforms integrated approaches. Keyword strategy is one of the clearest examples of where integration pays off in measurable terms.

How to Build a Keyword List That Actually Reflects Your Business

Start with your commercial objectives, not a keyword tool. What does the business need to achieve in the next 12 months? Which customer segments are the priority? What problems are you solving, and for whom? These questions determine the scope of your keyword research before you open a single tool.

From there, build a seed list. This is a collection of terms that represent your core offering, your audience’s core problems, and the language your customers actually use. The sources I mentioned earlier apply here: sales conversations, customer service records, reviews, forums, and competitor content. The seed list should be built on real language before it is validated by search volume data.

Then use keyword research tools to expand, quantify, and prioritise. Volume, difficulty, and click-through rate data help you make decisions about where to focus effort. But they are inputs to a judgment call, not a substitute for one. A keyword with moderate volume, low difficulty, and strong intent alignment will almost always outperform a high-volume keyword with fierce competition and mixed intent.

Cluster your keywords by topic and intent rather than treating them as individual targets. Search engines have become sophisticated at understanding semantic relationships between terms. A single well-constructed piece of content can rank for dozens of related phrases if it genuinely addresses the topic with depth and specificity. Building your content strategy around clusters rather than individual keywords is both more efficient and more durable.

Finally, build in a review cadence. Keyword performance changes. New competitors enter markets. New products create new search behaviour. Customer language evolves. A keyword strategy that was well-calibrated 18 months ago may be significantly off today. The businesses that maintain a consistent review process tend to hold their positions. The ones that treat keyword research as a one-time project tend to drift.

The Role of Negative Keywords in Paid Search

Negative keywords are the terms you explicitly exclude from paid search campaigns. They are one of the most underused levers in paid keyword strategy, and one of the most commercially significant.

Every paid search campaign attracts some irrelevant traffic. Someone searching for a free version of your software, a job at your company, or a competitor’s product with a similar name will sometimes trigger your ads. Without a well-maintained negative keyword list, you are paying for those clicks. Across large budgets, the waste is substantial.

The discipline of negative keyword management also forces a useful conversation about who you are and are not trying to reach. When you sit down to define what you want to exclude, you are implicitly defining what you want to include. That exercise has strategic value beyond the immediate budget efficiency it creates.

I have seen paid search accounts where negative keyword lists had not been reviewed in over a year. The budget leakage in those accounts was consistently in the range of 15 to 25 percent of total spend. That is not a rounding error. It is a meaningful portion of a marketing budget being spent on people who were never going to buy anything.

What Keyword Strategy Tells You About Your Positioning

Keyword strategy is a mirror. What you are able to rank for, what you are competing for, and where you are losing tells you a great deal about how clearly your positioning is defined and how well it is understood by your target audience.

If your keyword research surfaces a long list of terms where you have no realistic chance of competing, that is often a positioning problem as much as a competitive one. You may be trying to occupy a space that is already owned, without a sufficiently differentiated reason for someone to choose you over the incumbent. The keyword data surfaces that problem. The solution is upstream, in positioning and messaging, not in the keyword list itself.

Conversely, when keyword research identifies a cluster of high-intent terms where competition is low and your product or service is genuinely well-suited, that is a signal worth acting on quickly. It represents a window of opportunity that will close as the market matures and more competitors recognise the same gap.

BCG’s research on brand strategy and go-to-market alignment makes a related point: the businesses that grow fastest are those where brand positioning and commercial execution are pulling in the same direction. Keyword strategy is one of the clearest tests of whether that alignment actually exists in practice.

The connection between keyword decisions and broader growth strategy runs deeper than most teams realise. If you are working through how your keyword approach fits into a larger commercial framework, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is a useful place to work through the surrounding decisions.

Measuring Keyword Performance Without Fooling Yourself

Keyword rankings are a leading indicator, not an outcome. Position one for a term that does not convert is not a win. It is a vanity metric with a cost attached to it.

The metrics that matter for keyword performance are the ones that connect to business outcomes: organic sessions from target keyword clusters, conversion rates from those sessions, cost per acquisition from paid keyword campaigns, and revenue or pipeline attributed to organic search. These numbers tell you whether your keyword strategy is working commercially. Rankings tell you whether you are visible. Visibility without conversion is a cost, not a result.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, and one of the consistent patterns among the strongest entries was that they could trace a clear line from their marketing activity to a business outcome. Not a proxy metric. Not a reach figure. An actual commercial result. Keyword strategy needs to be held to the same standard. If you cannot draw a line from your keyword investment to revenue or pipeline, you are measuring the wrong things.

Attribution is imperfect, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But imperfect attribution is not the same as no accountability. You can make reasonable estimates of keyword contribution to revenue using a combination of conversion data, assisted conversion reports, and cohort analysis. That is honest approximation. It is more useful than either false precision or no measurement at all.

Vidyard’s research into pipeline and revenue potential for GTM teams highlights a broader point: the gap between marketing activity and revenue visibility is one of the most persistent problems in go-to-market execution. Keyword measurement is one place where that gap can be meaningfully narrowed with the right reporting structure.

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.

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