Keyword Strategy: Pick Fewer, Win More

Choosing the right keyword is less about search volume and more about commercial intent. The keywords that drive the most traffic are rarely the ones that drive the most revenue, and confusing the two is one of the most expensive mistakes a marketing team can make.

A keyword strategy that works starts with understanding what your audience is actually trying to accomplish, not what your product team wants to rank for. That distinction sounds obvious. In practice, it gets ignored constantly.

Why Keyword Selection Is a Strategy Problem, Not a Tactical One

Most teams treat keyword selection as an SEO task. Someone opens a keyword research tool, filters by volume, checks difficulty scores, and builds a list. That process is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that it starts in the wrong place.

I spent a long time early in my career over-indexing on lower-funnel performance. It felt safe. The numbers were clean, the attribution was tidy, and you could show a cost-per-acquisition that made sense in a spreadsheet. What I eventually realised was that a significant portion of what we were crediting to performance activity was going to happen anyway. We were capturing intent that already existed, not creating new demand. The keywords we were bidding on were full of people who had already decided. We were just standing at the exit.

That is not a keyword problem. That is a strategy problem dressed up as a keyword problem. And it is far more common than most marketing teams want to admit.

Keyword strategy sits inside a broader set of go-to-market decisions. If you are thinking carefully about how your business grows, how you reach new audiences, and how you convert them efficiently, keyword selection is one of the levers inside that system. It is not the system itself. For more on building that system properly, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture.

What Most Keyword Guides Get Wrong

The standard advice is to target keywords with high volume and low competition. That advice is not wrong, exactly. It is just incomplete in a way that leads people to make bad decisions.

Volume without intent is noise. A keyword that gets 50,000 searches a month is worthless to your business if the people searching it are nowhere near a buying decision. Ranking for it costs time, budget, and content resource. It inflates your traffic numbers. It does almost nothing for revenue.

I have seen this play out in agency pitches more times than I can count. A prospective client would come in with a traffic target. We would look at their current keyword set and find that most of their organic traffic was coming from terms with no commercial relevance whatsoever. They were ranking well. Their business was not growing. Those two things were entirely unconnected.

The other mistake is treating keyword difficulty as the primary filter. Difficulty scores are useful context, but they tell you about competition, not about fit. A highly competitive keyword that is perfectly aligned with your buyer’s decision moment is worth fighting for. A low-difficulty keyword that attracts the wrong audience is not worth ranking for at any cost.

This is part of a wider pattern that Vidyard have written about, noting that go-to-market execution feels harder than it used to, partly because teams are optimising for the wrong signals. Keyword strategy is a textbook example of that problem.

How to Think About Keyword Intent Before You Build a List

Before you open a keyword tool, you need to answer three questions. Who is searching? What are they trying to do? And where are they in their decision process?

Those three questions sound simple. They are genuinely hard to answer well, because they require you to think from the outside in rather than the inside out. Most marketing teams default to the inside out. They start with what they sell and work backwards to what someone might search for. That is the wrong direction.

Think about the clothes shop analogy. Someone who walks in, picks something up, and tries it on is far more likely to buy than someone who walks past the window. The keyword equivalent is the person who types something specific and functional, not something broad and exploratory. They are already in the shop. The question is whether your content is the right fitting room.

Intent breaks down into roughly four categories. Informational intent covers people learning about a topic. Navigational intent covers people looking for a specific brand or site. Commercial intent covers people comparing options before a decision. Transactional intent covers people ready to act. Most keyword strategies over-invest in informational content and under-invest in commercial and transactional terms, because informational content is easier to produce and generates more traffic. But traffic without intent is a vanity metric.

The commercial transformation research from BCG on go-to-market strategy makes a related point about growth: the businesses that grow fastest are the ones that align their commercial activity most tightly with where their buyers actually are, not where it is easiest to reach them. Keyword strategy is a microcosm of that principle.

The Case for a Narrower Keyword Footprint

There is a temptation in keyword strategy to go wide. Cover every variant. Target every related term. Build content for every stage of the funnel simultaneously. That approach feels comprehensive. In practice, it produces a shallow, unfocused presence that ranks for a lot of things and converts on very few of them.

When I was running agencies and working with clients across 30 different industries, the pattern I saw consistently was that the businesses with the strongest organic performance had made deliberate choices about what they were not going to target. They had a clear view of which keywords represented their best customers at their most convertible moments, and they built depth around those terms rather than breadth across everything adjacent.

Depth means more than just ranking. It means owning the topic. It means having the most useful, most specific, most commercially relevant content for that search. It means that when someone types that keyword, your page does the job better than anything else out there. That is a harder standard than ranking on page one. It is also the standard that actually drives business outcomes.

A narrower footprint also makes measurement cleaner. If you are targeting 400 keywords, attribution becomes a mess. If you are targeting 40 with real precision and commercial intent, you can actually track what is working and why. That clarity compounds over time.

Keyword Selection and Positioning Are the Same Decision

This is the point that most SEO-focused keyword guides miss entirely. The keywords you choose to target are a positioning statement. They define what category you are competing in, what problem you are solving, and who you are solving it for. That is not a search engine decision. That is a business decision.

I remember a brainstorm early in my agency career, the kind where the founder hands you the whiteboard pen and walks out of the room for a client call. You are suddenly responsible for the thinking, with a room full of people waiting. The pressure in that moment is clarifying. You cannot hide behind process or tools. You have to have a point of view. Keyword strategy works the same way. Strip away the software, and what you are left with is a question: what does this business stand for, and who is it for? The keyword list should be the answer to that question expressed in search terms.

If your positioning is unclear, your keyword strategy will be unclear. You will try to target everything because you have not made the harder decision about what you are actually best at. The keyword list becomes a symptom of a positioning problem that no amount of SEO work will fix.

This is why keyword strategy belongs in the same conversation as go-to-market planning, not downstream from it. By the time you are building a keyword list, the positioning decisions should already be made. If they are not, stop. Make them first.

A Practical Framework for Choosing Keywords That Actually Matter

Here is how I would approach keyword selection for a business that wants to use it as a genuine growth lever rather than a traffic exercise.

Start with your best customers, not your product. Interview them, or review what you already know about them. What language do they use to describe the problem your product solves? What did they search for before they found you? What would they have typed if they had known exactly what they needed? That language is your keyword foundation. It is more valuable than anything a keyword tool will surface on its own.

Then map those terms to decision moments. When is someone searching this? Are they at the beginning of a problem, in the middle of evaluating options, or ready to act? Each of those moments requires different content and a different commercial approach. Do not try to serve all three with the same page.

Filter by commercial relevance before you filter by volume. Ask: if someone searches this and lands on our site, is there a realistic path to a business outcome? If the honest answer is no, remove it from the list regardless of the volume number. Traffic that does not convert is a cost, not an asset.

Then look at what you can realistically compete for. This is where difficulty scores become useful, as one input among several rather than the primary filter. A new site cannot compete for broad, high-volume terms on day one. That is not a reason to avoid ambition. It is a reason to sequence your targeting, building authority in a defined area before expanding.

Finally, choose a small number of primary keywords and commit to them. Not ten. Not fifty. A handful of terms that represent your best customers at their most convertible moments. Build depth around those. Create the most useful content that exists for those searches. Earn the ranking rather than gaming it.

Where Keyword Strategy Breaks Down in Practice

Even teams that understand the theory make predictable mistakes in execution. The most common one is consensus-driven keyword selection. Everyone in the room has a favourite term they want to rank for. The list grows by addition rather than by decision. Nobody wants to cut anything because cutting something feels like losing. The result is a sprawling list with no real priorities and no chance of building depth anywhere.

The second most common mistake is letting the tool drive the strategy. Keyword research tools are genuinely useful. They surface data you would not find otherwise. But they do not know your business, your customers, or your competitive position. They show you what exists. They cannot tell you what matters. That judgement has to come from the people in the room.

The third mistake is treating keyword selection as a one-time exercise. Markets change. Language changes. The way people describe their problems evolves. A keyword list that was right eighteen months ago may be significantly wrong today. Building in a regular review process, not to rebuild from scratch but to sense-check and adjust, is part of running a keyword strategy rather than just building one.

The scaling research from BCG on agile scaling is instructive here, even if the context is different. The principle that iterative, adaptive approaches outperform big-bang planning applies directly to keyword strategy. Build, measure, adjust. Do not treat the first list as the final list.

Long-Tail Keywords and the Specificity Advantage

Long-tail keywords get recommended constantly, often without a clear explanation of why they work. The reason is specificity. A more specific search indicates a more specific need, which usually means a clearer decision moment and a higher probability of conversion.

Someone searching “marketing software” is browsing. Someone searching “marketing automation software for B2B SaaS under 50 employees” has a specific problem and is looking for a specific answer. The second search has a fraction of the volume. It has a multiple of the intent. For most businesses, especially those without the domain authority to compete for broad terms, the second search is the right place to start.

Long-tail does not mean low ambition. It means precise targeting. The goal is to be the definitive answer to a specific question for a specific person at a specific moment. That is harder to do than it sounds, and it is worth considerably more than ranking fifth for a broad term that generates traffic with no commercial value.

There is also a compounding effect. Businesses that build genuine authority in a defined area tend to find that broader terms become more accessible over time. You earn your way into the competitive landscape from a position of demonstrated relevance rather than trying to buy your way in from the start. That is a more durable position.

Connecting Keyword Strategy to Revenue, Not Just Rankings

Rankings are a leading indicator. Revenue is the outcome. Most keyword reporting stops at rankings and traffic because those numbers are easier to produce and easier to present. But if you cannot draw a line from your keyword strategy to business outcomes, you are not running a strategy. You are running a reporting exercise.

The connection between keyword and revenue runs through conversion. What happens when someone lands on your page from a specific search? Is the content aligned with what they were looking for? Is there a clear next step? Does the page earn the click-through from search and then earn the conversion on site? Those questions are as important as the ranking itself.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically about marketing effectiveness rather than creativity for its own sake. The campaigns that stand out are the ones where every element of the strategy, including how people find you, is connected to a measurable business outcome. Keyword strategy at its best works the same way. Every term on your list should have a clear rationale that connects back to a business objective. If it does not, it should not be on the list.

The Vidyard revenue report on pipeline and go-to-market teams makes a useful point about untapped revenue potential sitting inside existing go-to-market activity. Keyword strategy is one of the clearest examples of that. Most businesses are not extracting the revenue potential from their current keyword footprint because the connection between search activity and commercial outcomes has not been properly built.

If you are working through how keyword strategy fits into a broader growth framework, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the surrounding decisions that make keyword work land properly, from audience definition to commercial measurement.

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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