Keywords Still Matter. Just Not the Way Most Teams Use Them

Keywords still matter. But most teams are using them in a way that creates activity without strategy, optimising for search volume when they should be optimising for commercial intent. The question isn’t whether keywords matter. It’s whether your keyword strategy is connected to anything that actually drives growth.

Most keyword strategies I’ve seen are built backwards. Teams start with a tool, pull a list of high-volume terms, and then try to reverse-engineer content around them. That’s not a strategy. That’s a content production process dressed up as one.

What Keywords Actually Are (And What They’re Not)

A keyword is a signal. It tells you what someone is thinking about at a specific moment, in a specific context. That’s genuinely useful information. The problem is that most teams treat keywords as content briefs rather than commercial signals, and that’s where the strategy breaks down.

When I was running agencies, I’d regularly sit in keyword strategy sessions where the conversation was entirely about volume and difficulty. Which terms have the most searches? Which ones can we rank for? Almost never: which of these terms represents someone who is likely to become a customer? The two conversations are completely different, and conflating them is expensive.

Keywords are a window into demand that already exists. Someone searching for “enterprise CRM software comparison” is telling you something precise about where they are in a buying process. Someone searching for “what is CRM” is telling you something very different. Both are useful. But they’re useful in different ways, for different parts of your business, and they require different responses. Treating them the same way, which most keyword strategies do, is a structural error.

If you want a sharper framework for thinking about how keyword strategy connects to broader commercial planning, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture, from audience mapping through to channel selection and measurement.

The Volume Trap: Why High-Traffic Keywords Underdeliver

Search volume is seductive. A keyword with 40,000 monthly searches feels like an opportunity. And sometimes it is. But more often, high-volume terms attract the wrong audience, at the wrong stage, with the wrong intent, and teams spend months trying to rank for them before realising the traffic doesn’t convert.

I spent a chunk of my earlier career overvaluing lower-funnel performance signals. When you’re managing large ad budgets, there’s a natural gravitational pull toward the metrics that look cleanest: clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition. The problem is that a lot of what gets credited to lower-funnel activity was going to happen anyway. The customer had already made their decision. You just showed up at the right moment and took the credit.

The same logic applies to keyword strategy. If you’re only targeting high-intent, low-funnel keywords, you’re largely capturing demand that already exists. That’s not bad. But it’s not growth. Growth requires reaching people who aren’t already looking for you, which means thinking about keywords across the full funnel, not just the bottom of it.

Think about it this way. Someone who walks into a clothes shop and tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone browsing a window display. The keyword equivalent of getting someone into the fitting room is content that meets them at the awareness or consideration stage, earns their attention, and builds a commercial relationship before they’re ready to buy. High-volume informational keywords, used correctly, can do that. But most teams either ignore them entirely or produce content against them without any conversion logic attached.

Search Intent Is the Variable That Changes Everything

If there’s one concept that separates functional keyword strategy from genuinely useful keyword strategy, it’s intent. Not every search is equal. The same word can carry completely different intent depending on context, and ranking for the wrong interpretation of a keyword is a waste of everyone’s time.

Intent broadly breaks into four categories: informational (someone wants to learn), navigational (someone wants to find a specific thing), commercial (someone is evaluating options), and transactional (someone is ready to act). Most keyword tools will show you volume across all four without distinguishing between them. That’s your job.

A keyword with 200 monthly searches and clear commercial intent, say “B2B email marketing platform for logistics companies,” will almost always outperform a 20,000-search term like “email marketing” in terms of business value. The audience is more qualified. The intent is clearer. The content you need to produce is more specific and therefore harder for competitors to replicate. And the conversion rate will be dramatically higher.

When I was growing an agency from a small team to over 100 people, one of the things that consistently separated the clients who grew from the ones who plateaued was their willingness to go narrow on intent before going broad on volume. The instinct is always to go after the big numbers. The discipline is to ask: big numbers of who, exactly?

The Gap Between Ranking and Revenue

Position one on Google is not a business outcome. It’s a distribution mechanism. What happens after someone clicks is where most keyword strategies fall apart, and it’s the part that gets the least attention.

I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. A team invests six to twelve months building content around a set of keywords, earns strong rankings, generates significant traffic, and then discovers that almost none of it converts. The post-mortem usually reveals one of three problems: the keyword attracted the wrong audience, the content answered the search query but didn’t serve a commercial purpose, or the page had no logical next step for someone ready to go further.

All three are fixable. But none of them get fixed if you’re only measuring rankings and traffic. The keyword strategy has to be connected to conversion architecture from the start, not bolted on afterwards. That means thinking about what someone who searches for a given term actually needs to see, what action you want them to take, and whether the page you’re building genuinely serves both of those things.

This is where keyword strategy stops being an SEO question and becomes a commercial question. What does this visitor need? What does my business need from this visit? Where do those two things overlap? If you can’t answer all three, the keyword probably shouldn’t be on your list, regardless of what the volume data says.

Tools like SEMrush’s breakdown of growth-focused content approaches are useful for understanding how keyword strategy connects to broader acquisition models, though the commercial logic still has to come from you, not the tool.

How Keyword Strategy Connects to Go-To-Market Planning

The most underused application of keyword research isn’t content planning. It’s go-to-market validation. Search data is one of the few places where you can observe real demand at scale, without a survey, without a focus group, and without the distortion of people telling you what they think you want to hear.

If you’re entering a new market, launching a new product, or repositioning an existing one, keyword data can tell you whether the audience you’re targeting actually uses the language you’re planning to use. It can tell you what problems they’re searching for solutions to, which competitors they’re already evaluating, and what questions they need answered before they’ll buy. That’s not SEO data. That’s market intelligence.

I remember a client who was convinced their target audience used one set of terms to describe their problem. The keyword data told a completely different story. The volume was concentrated around a different framing entirely, one that the client considered too simplistic for their positioning. We had a long conversation about whether to lead with the language the market actually used or the language the brand wanted to own. In the end, they chose the market’s language, and the content performed significantly better for it.

This is where keyword research and go-to-market strategy intersect in a way that’s genuinely valuable. It’s not about chasing volume. It’s about understanding how your audience thinks about the problem you solve, and then building your content, your messaging, and your commercial architecture around that understanding.

For a broader view of how this kind of intelligence fits into go-to-market planning, Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market execution has become harder is worth reading. The short version: markets are more fragmented, buyer journeys are less linear, and the assumption that you can build a channel strategy around a single keyword cluster is increasingly difficult to sustain.

What a Commercially Grounded Keyword Strategy Actually Looks Like

Most keyword strategies I’ve reviewed follow the same structure: export a list from a tool, filter by volume and difficulty, group by topic, assign to a content calendar. That process produces content. It doesn’t produce strategy.

A commercially grounded keyword strategy starts from a different place. It starts with the customer, specifically with the questions a customer asks at each stage of a buying decision, and then works backwards to identify which of those questions have meaningful search volume attached to them.

The sequence looks more like this. First, map your customer types and the decision stages they move through. Second, identify the questions they’re asking at each stage. Third, check whether those questions have search volume. Fourth, evaluate the intent behind each keyword against what your business needs from that audience at that stage. Fifth, build content that genuinely serves the searcher while moving them toward a commercial outcome.

That last part is harder than it sounds. Content that genuinely serves a searcher and content that’s optimised for a keyword are not always the same thing. When they’re not, the searcher wins and the business loses. The discipline is in finding the overlap, and being honest when it doesn’t exist for a given keyword.

Resources like Crazy Egg’s overview of growth-focused acquisition approaches are useful for contextualising where keyword strategy sits within a broader growth model, though the specifics of commercial intent mapping will always be business-specific.

The Competitive Keyword Question Nobody Asks

Most keyword strategies treat competition as a difficulty score. If the keyword difficulty is high, it goes in the “aspirational” column. If it’s low, it goes in the “quick wins” column. That’s a reasonable heuristic. It’s not a strategy.

The more useful competitive question is: why are competitors ranking for this keyword, and can we produce something genuinely better? Not marginally longer. Not more recently updated. Actually better, in a way that a searcher would recognise and prefer.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, one of the things that consistently separated effective work from merely competent work was specificity. The campaigns that worked were built around a precise understanding of who they were trying to reach and what that person actually needed to hear. The ones that didn’t work were built around broad assumptions dressed up as insights.

The same principle applies to keyword competition. If you’re going after a keyword where the top-ranking content is genuinely excellent, you need a specific reason to believe you can do better. If that reason doesn’t exist, your resources are probably better deployed elsewhere. Being honest about that is harder than it sounds when there’s pressure to go after high-volume terms regardless of whether you have a realistic path to ranking for them.

The Hotjar growth loop framework is worth reviewing for how user behaviour data can complement keyword data in understanding whether your content is actually serving the people who find it, not just attracting them.

Keywords in the Age of AI Search: What’s Actually Changing

The conversation about whether keywords still matter has sharpened considerably with the rise of AI-generated search responses. If Google is answering questions directly in the results page, does ranking for informational keywords still have commercial value? It’s a legitimate question, and the honest answer is: it depends on the keyword.

For purely informational queries, the click-through rate from search has been declining for years. AI overviews accelerate that trend. If your keyword strategy is built primarily on informational content with no commercial architecture attached, that’s a problem that predates AI search and is now becoming more acute.

For commercial and transactional queries, the picture is different. Someone evaluating options, comparing vendors, or looking for a specific solution is less likely to be satisfied by an AI summary and more likely to click through to content that gives them the depth they need. That’s where keyword strategy retains its full value, and arguably becomes more valuable as the informational layer gets commoditised.

The practical implication is that keyword strategy needs to be more commercially oriented than ever. Informational content that doesn’t have a clear path to commercial intent is increasingly hard to justify on SEO grounds alone. The bar for what constitutes genuinely useful content has risen, and teams that were producing thin content against high-volume informational keywords are going to feel that acutely.

This doesn’t mean informational content is dead. It means it has to work harder. It has to be specific enough, useful enough, and differentiated enough that a searcher chooses to engage with it rather than accept an AI summary. That’s a higher standard than most content currently meets.

The Measurement Problem in Keyword Strategy

One of the persistent frustrations I’ve had with keyword strategy, across agencies and client-side work, is the measurement gap. Teams measure rankings and traffic. They rarely measure what happens after the traffic arrives, and even more rarely connect keyword performance to actual revenue.

Part of this is a tooling problem. The connection between a keyword ranking and a closed deal can be long, indirect, and difficult to attribute cleanly. But part of it is a prioritisation problem. If your keyword strategy is being evaluated on rankings and sessions, that’s what it will optimise for. If it’s being evaluated on qualified leads and pipeline contribution, it will optimise for something very different.

The measurement framework you choose shapes the strategy you build. I’ve seen this play out enough times to be confident about it. Teams that measure keyword performance against traffic metrics produce content that attracts traffic. Teams that measure against commercial outcomes produce content that drives commercial outcomes. The difference in output is significant, even when the keyword lists look similar on paper.

If you’re building or reviewing a keyword strategy, the measurement question is worth settling before the keyword research begins. What does success look like, specifically? Not “more organic traffic.” What kind of traffic, from what kind of searcher, taking what kind of action? If you can answer that precisely, you have a basis for evaluating whether a keyword belongs on your list. If you can’t, you’re optimising for activity, not outcomes.

More of the thinking behind how measurement connects to broader growth strategy is in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, which covers the full commercial planning picture rather than any single channel in isolation.

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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