Keyword Strategy: Stop Chasing Volume, Start Chasing Intent

A keyword strategy is a framework for deciding which search terms to target, in what order, and for what commercial purpose. Done well, it connects your content and paid search decisions directly to buying behaviour. Done badly, it becomes a list of high-volume terms that attract traffic you cannot convert.

Most keyword strategies fail not because of bad data, but because of a fundamental misread of what the data represents. A search volume number tells you how often a term is entered. It tells you almost nothing about why, or by whom, or whether those people have any interest in what you sell.

Getting that distinction right is where keyword strategy separates from keyword research. One is a spreadsheet exercise. The other is a commercial decision.

Why Most Keyword Strategies Are Just Wish Lists

Early in my career, I made the same mistake most performance marketers make. I was deeply in love with lower-funnel signals. High purchase intent, low funnel, measurable conversion. It felt like the only place worth being. If someone was searching for exactly what we sold, we wanted to own that term. Full stop.

It took years of managing large budgets across multiple categories to realise that a significant portion of what we were crediting to lower-funnel keyword performance was going to happen anyway. The person typing a branded product search into Google was already decided. We were paying to intercept a decision already made, not to influence one in progress. That is not a keyword strategy. That is an expensive way to take credit for organic demand.

The better analogy is a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone browsing the window. Your keyword strategy should be thinking about how to get people into the fitting room, not just standing at the till waiting for people who already know what they want. The terms that reach people before intent crystallises are harder to measure but far more commercially valuable over time.

This is the core problem with most keyword strategies: they are built backwards. They start with what the business wants to sell and work outward from there. A well-constructed strategy starts with how buyers think, what they search at each stage of a decision, and then maps the business’s content and paid activity to those moments in a deliberate sequence.

The Three Layers of Search Intent (And Why They Matter Commercially)

Intent classification is not new. Informational, navigational, transactional. Most SEO practitioners know the taxonomy. Fewer apply it with any commercial rigour.

Informational queries are research-stage searches. Someone is trying to understand something, compare options, or solve a problem. They are not ready to buy. Targeting these terms with conversion-heavy landing pages is a category error. You will get traffic, generate a bounce rate that makes your analytics look grim, and conclude the keyword does not work. The keyword worked fine. The page was wrong.

Navigational queries are brand or destination searches. The user knows where they are going. Competing here against established brands without significant brand equity is expensive and usually futile. The exception is competitive conquest in paid search, which is a tactical decision, not a strategic one.

Transactional queries are where most keyword budgets concentrate. Someone is ready to act. The commercial value is high. So is the competition. And so is the cost per click.

The fourth layer that gets underweighted is investigative or commercial intent: searches that sit between informational and transactional. “Best CRM for small teams”, “alternatives to Salesforce”, “HubSpot vs Pipedrive”. These are decision-stage searches. The user has a problem, is actively evaluating solutions, and has not committed. This is where keyword strategy can create genuine competitive advantage, because the content required to rank here is specific, substantive, and difficult for competitors to replicate quickly.

Thinking about go-to-market strategy through the lens of search intent is something I cover in more depth across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, where keyword decisions sit alongside positioning, channel selection, and audience targeting as connected commercial choices rather than isolated tactics.

How to Build a Keyword Strategy That Reflects Actual Buyer Behaviour

Start with the customer problem, not the product feature. This sounds obvious. It is almost universally ignored in practice.

When I was running an agency and we took on a new client in financial services, the instinct of their internal team was to target terms directly related to their product names and category. Sensible on the surface. The problem was that their target customers did not know the product category existed. They were searching for the problem, not the solution. The keyword strategy needed to start two steps earlier in the decision chain.

The process I have found most reliable works in four stages.

Stage 1: Map the Decision experience Before Opening a Keyword Tool

Before you look at a single search volume number, write out the questions a potential customer asks at each stage of their decision. What triggers the need? What do they search first? What do they compare? What objections do they have? What signals trust?

This exercise produces a rough content map. It also exposes the gaps between what the business wants to say and what buyers actually want to know. Those gaps are where keyword strategy gets interesting, because they often reveal underserved search territory with real commercial value and low competition.

Tools like SEMrush’s market penetration analysis can help validate the size of specific search segments once you have done the qualitative thinking. But the thinking has to come first. If you open a keyword tool before you understand the buyer, you will optimise for volume rather than fit.

Stage 2: Cluster by Intent, Not Just Topic

Most keyword clustering groups terms by semantic similarity. That is useful for content organisation but insufficient for commercial strategy. You also need to cluster by intent stage, because the same topic can attract very different types of searcher depending on how the query is phrased.

“Project management software” is informational to mid-funnel. “Best project management software for agencies” is commercial intent. “Asana pricing” is transactional. All three are in the same topic cluster. All three require different content, different calls to action, and different success metrics.

When I was scaling a digital agency from a small team to over a hundred people, content strategy was one of the levers we used to build authority in specific verticals. We learned quickly that publishing informational content and measuring it on conversion rate was a guaranteed way to make the content team feel like they were failing. The metrics had to match the intent. Informational content earns attention and builds topical authority. Transactional content earns conversions. Conflating the two poisons both.

Stage 3: Assess Competitive Difficulty With Realistic Honesty

Keyword difficulty scores are useful approximations. They are not verdicts. A high-difficulty term is not automatically unwinnable. A low-difficulty term is not automatically worth pursuing. The question is whether your domain authority, content depth, and linking profile give you a realistic chance of ranking in a position that generates meaningful traffic within a timeframe that matters commercially.

For most businesses outside the top tier of their category, the sustainable opportunity is in the middle: terms with genuine commercial intent, moderate competition, and enough search volume to justify investment. The very high-volume generic terms are dominated by category leaders and aggregators. The very long-tail terms often have too little volume to move the needle. The productive territory is the specific, intent-rich middle ground.

This is where growth-focused keyword analysis tends to find its best returns: not chasing category-defining head terms, but building a cluster of mid-funnel, commercially relevant terms that collectively drive qualified traffic at a cost that makes sense.

Stage 4: Align Paid and Organic Into One Intent Framework

One of the most persistent inefficiencies I have seen across client organisations is the separation of paid search and SEO into distinct silos with no shared keyword logic. The paid team bids on terms based on conversion data. The SEO team targets terms based on organic opportunity. Nobody is coordinating intent coverage across the full funnel.

The result is predictable: the business over-invests in paid capture of high-intent terms it could rank for organically, while leaving the mid-funnel almost entirely uncontested. Organic content that could qualify and warm prospects before they reach transactional queries never gets built, because the SEO team is also chasing volume rather than funnel coverage.

A unified intent framework fixes this. Paid search covers the transactional terms where speed and position matter most. Organic content builds authority and coverage across informational and commercial intent terms. The two strategies reinforce each other rather than duplicating effort. This is the kind of structural thinking that makes go-to-market execution feel harder than it should be when it is missing, and considerably more efficient when it is in place.

The Measurement Problem With Keyword Strategy

Keyword performance measurement is where strategy goes to die in most organisations. The metrics that are easiest to track, rankings and traffic volume, are the least commercially meaningful. The metrics that matter most, qualified pipeline influenced by organic content, are the hardest to attribute cleanly.

I have judged the Effie Awards and reviewed effectiveness cases from some of the most sophisticated marketing organisations in the world. Even at that level, the attribution between upper-funnel content and downstream commercial outcomes is rarely clean. It is always an approximation. The question is whether the approximation is honest and directionally useful, or whether it is reverse-engineered to justify a decision already made.

For keyword strategy, honest measurement means accepting that informational content will not show strong last-click conversion data, and that this is not evidence the content is not working. It means tracking engagement signals, return visit rates, time on page, and assisted conversion paths alongside direct conversion metrics. And it means having the organisational patience to wait for organic strategies to compound, which typically takes longer than anyone’s quarterly reporting cycle wants to accommodate.

The Forrester intelligent growth model frames this well: sustainable growth comes from building compounding assets, not just optimising current-period performance. A keyword strategy built around long-term topical authority is a compounding asset. A keyword strategy built around bidding on the highest-intent terms available is a recurring cost.

Where Keyword Strategy Connects to Broader Go-To-Market Thinking

Keyword strategy is not an SEO function. It is a commercial function. The terms you target define what audience you are trying to reach, at what stage of their decision, with what message. That is positioning work. That is audience strategy. That is go-to-market thinking applied to search behaviour.

When I took over the running of a digital agency, one of the first things I noticed was how disconnected the SEO team’s keyword decisions were from the broader commercial strategy the business was pursuing. They were targeting terms that generated traffic. Nobody had asked whether the traffic was in the right category, at the right decision stage, or representative of the customers the business actually wanted to acquire.

Fixing that required connecting keyword strategy back to the positioning work: who are we targeting, what problems do we solve, where do those people search when they have those problems. Once that connection was made, the keyword decisions became much cleaner. Some high-volume terms came off the list because the intent was wrong. Some low-volume terms came onto the list because the intent was exactly right. Traffic went down slightly in the short term. Qualified leads went up considerably.

The BCG work on brand and go-to-market strategy alignment makes a similar point at a structural level: when commercial strategy and marketing execution are not coordinated, the result is activity that looks productive but does not compound into growth. Keyword strategy is one of the clearest examples of where that misalignment shows up.

This is a thread I return to regularly across the Growth Strategy hub: the most effective marketing decisions are the ones that start from a clear commercial position and work outward, rather than starting from a tactic and trying to justify it retrospectively. Keyword strategy is no different.

Common Keyword Strategy Mistakes Worth Naming Directly

Targeting branded terms as a primary organic strategy. If your keyword strategy is dominated by your own brand name, you are not doing keyword strategy. You are doing brand maintenance. The two are not the same.

Treating keyword difficulty as a binary pass or fail. A term being competitive does not mean you cannot rank for it. It means you need a better content asset, a stronger linking strategy, or more time. The question is whether the commercial return justifies the investment, not whether the difficulty score is below an arbitrary threshold.

Publishing content for every keyword in the cluster without a clear content hierarchy. Not every keyword deserves a standalone page. Some terms are best addressed within a broader piece. Over-indexing on thin, keyword-specific pages creates content sprawl that dilutes authority rather than building it.

Ignoring seasonal and cyclical search behaviour. Many categories have significant search volume variation across the year. Building a keyword strategy on annual averages can lead to misaligned content calendars, where you publish content in the wrong season and miss the window when search intent is highest.

Letting keyword strategy drift from business strategy. Markets change. Buyer language changes. The terms people use to describe their problems in one year are not always the terms they use two years later. A keyword strategy needs a review cadence, not just a build-and-maintain approach. The pipeline and revenue potential that goes-to-market teams leave on the table is often a direct result of keyword and content strategies that have not been revisited as the market has moved.

A Note on AI and Keyword Strategy

The arrival of AI-generated content at scale has changed the competitive landscape for organic search in ways that are still playing out. The practical implication for keyword strategy is that the terms easiest to rank for are also the terms most susceptible to being flooded with AI-generated content of variable quality. The defensible territory is increasingly in specific, experience-driven, authoritative content that a language model cannot produce credibly.

This is not an argument against using AI in content production. It is an argument for being deliberate about where your keyword strategy concentrates. Terms where depth, specificity, and demonstrated expertise matter are more defensible than terms where a generic informational answer is sufficient. That distinction should inform both which terms you target and what kind of content you create to target them.

The BCG research on scaling agile practices has a parallel insight: speed of execution without strategic clarity produces volume, not value. In keyword strategy, publishing more content faster is only an advantage if the content is targeted at terms where it can actually compete and convert.

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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