Buyer’s Journey Keyword Research: Stop Targeting the Wrong Stage

Buyer’s experience keyword research is the practice of mapping search intent to each stage of the purchase process, so your content reaches people at the moment it can actually influence a decision. Most teams do this backwards: they chase high-volume, bottom-funnel terms and wonder why their pipeline is thin.

The problem is not a lack of keyword tools. It is a mental model that treats search as a transaction rather than a conversation that starts long before anyone is ready to buy. Fix the model, and the keyword strategy follows.

Why Most Keyword Strategies Are Accidentally Bottom-Funnel

Early in my career I was guilty of this myself. I overvalued lower-funnel performance because it was easy to point to. Someone searched for a brand or product term, clicked an ad, converted. Clean, attributable, satisfying. The problem is that a lot of that conversion was going to happen anyway. The person had already made their decision. You just happened to be standing at the checkout when they arrived.

When I was running agency teams and reviewing keyword strategies for clients across retail, financial services, and B2B software, the pattern was consistent. The keyword lists were dominated by product terms, competitor terms, and branded variations. Awareness-stage and consideration-stage content was either missing entirely or had been built without any keyword intent behind it. It looked like content. It did not function like content designed to capture demand at the point it was forming.

The reason this happens is structural. Performance marketing rewards what is measurable, and bottom-funnel conversions are measurable. Upper-funnel keyword content generates traffic that takes weeks or months to convert, and by the time it does, last-click attribution has handed the credit to a branded search or a retargeting ad. So teams rationally, if incorrectly, conclude that upper-funnel content does not work.

This is part of a broader go-to-market challenge that affects how companies allocate content and media investment across the funnel. If you are thinking about where buyer’s experience keyword research fits into your wider growth architecture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic context in more depth.

What Does Search Intent Actually Tell You About Buyer Stage?

Intent classification is the foundation of buyer’s experience keyword research, and it is more nuanced than the standard four-box model suggests. Informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional intent are useful starting categories, but they flatten a lot of variation within each stage.

Take informational intent. “What is CRM software” and “why do CRM implementations fail” are both informational queries. But the person asking the second question is considerably further along in their thinking. They are not learning what the category is. They are stress-testing a decision they are probably already leaning toward. That is a different content brief, a different tone, and a different call to action.

Commercial investigation keywords are where a lot of B2B and considered-purchase B2C value lives. Queries like “best project management software for remote teams” or “HubSpot vs Salesforce for mid-market” signal active evaluation. The person is comparing. They have a shortlist in mind, or they are building one. This is the stage where well-structured comparison content, honest third-party reviews, and detailed feature breakdowns do real work.

Transactional intent is the stage most teams over-invest in. “Buy CRM software”, “CRM software pricing”, “book a demo”. These keywords matter. You need to be there. But if you have only built content for this stage, you are only ever competing for people who have already done their research elsewhere. You did not shape their shortlist. You just showed up at the end.

The practical implication is that keyword research needs to start with a question: what is the buyer thinking about before they know they need us? That question forces you up the funnel in a useful way. It also tends to surface longer, lower-competition keyword phrases that are easier to rank for and convert better when the content actually matches the intent.

How to Map Keywords to Awareness, Consideration, and Decision Stages

The three-stage model (awareness, consideration, decision) is a simplification, but it is a useful one for keyword mapping because it forces you to think about what the buyer knows and does not know at each point.

At the awareness stage, the buyer is experiencing a problem or a goal but has not yet defined it in category terms. They are searching for symptoms, not solutions. A finance director searching “why is our customer acquisition cost increasing” is not yet looking for marketing software. They are trying to understand a business problem. If your content answers that question well, you have introduced your brand into a conversation before your competitors even knew it was happening.

Awareness-stage keywords tend to be question-based, problem-oriented, and category-agnostic. They often have high search volume and low commercial intent, which is why many keyword strategies deprioritise them. That is the opportunity. Lower competition, higher reach, and the chance to shape how a buyer frames their problem before they start evaluating solutions.

At the consideration stage, the buyer understands the category and is evaluating approaches. They are searching for comparisons, methodologies, and criteria. “How to choose marketing automation software”, “what to look for in a CRM”, “agency vs in-house SEO”. These searches signal active evaluation. The buyer is building a mental framework for making a decision, and content that helps them do that builds credibility in a way that a product page never can.

At the decision stage, the buyer is ready to act and is searching for confirmation, pricing, reviews, or a direct route to purchase. Keywords here are specific, often branded or product-named, and carry high commercial intent. This is where your product pages, pricing pages, demo requests, and case studies need to be optimised. The content at this stage needs to remove friction, not educate.

The practical workflow I have used with teams is straightforward. Start with the decision stage and work backwards. List every keyword you would want to rank for at the moment of purchase. Then ask: what would someone need to believe to search for that term? That belief came from somewhere, from content they read, comparisons they made, problems they diagnosed. Map the keywords that would have reached them at each of those prior moments. You end up with a keyword architecture that mirrors the actual purchase process rather than just the final step of it.

The Tools Are Not the Problem. The Brief Is.

I have sat in enough keyword research sessions to know that the limiting factor is rarely the tool. SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and even free tools like Answer the Public will surface plenty of keyword data. The problem is the brief that the researcher is working from.

If the brief says “find keywords with high volume and low difficulty in our category”, you will get a bottom-funnel list. Every time. Because that is what the tool will surface when you search by category terms. The brief needs to start differently: “find every question a buyer might ask from the moment they first experience the problem we solve to the moment they make a purchase decision.”

That brief produces a different starting point. Instead of entering your product category into the keyword tool, you enter the problem your product solves. Instead of “CRM software”, you enter “how to manage sales pipeline” or “why deals are falling through” or “how to improve sales team follow-up”. The keyword clusters you surface from those seeds are different, less competitive, and more likely to reach buyers before your competitors do.

A useful secondary technique is to use customer interview data and support ticket language as keyword seeds. The language buyers use to describe their problems before they know the solution category is almost never the language marketers use to describe their products. Bridging that gap is what good upper-funnel keyword research does. I have seen this approach surface content opportunities that no competitor had touched, simply because everyone else was starting from the product category rather than the buyer’s lived experience.

What Buyer Stage Keyword Research Looks Like in Practice

Here is a worked example from a category I know well: B2B marketing technology. A company selling marketing attribution software might build its keyword strategy entirely around “marketing attribution software”, “attribution platform”, “multi-touch attribution”. These are legitimate terms. But they only reach buyers who already know attribution software is a category that exists and have decided they want to evaluate it.

The buyers who do not yet know attribution software exists are searching for something else entirely. “Why is my paid search ROI hard to measure”, “how to prove marketing impact to the board”, “what is causing our CAC to rise”. These are awareness-stage searches. They are longer, more conversational, and they describe the pain before the solution. A piece of content that answers “how to prove marketing impact to the board” honestly and in depth will reach a CFO or CMO who is not yet in the market for attribution software but is experiencing exactly the problem that attribution software solves.

That content does not convert immediately. But it introduces the brand, it establishes credibility, and it plants a seed. When that buyer eventually searches for attribution software three months later, your brand is already in their frame of reference. You shaped the shortlist before the shortlist existed.

This is the same logic that applies to physical retail. Someone who tries on a piece of clothing is far more likely to buy it than someone who just browses the rail. The try-on is the equivalent of upper-funnel content. It creates a relationship with the product before the purchase decision. You cannot build a growth strategy entirely on capturing people who have already decided to buy. At some point you have to reach people before they have made up their minds.

Forrester’s research on intelligent growth models makes a similar point about where sustainable revenue growth actually comes from. It is not from defending existing intent. It is from reaching new audiences and new need states before competitors do.

How to Prioritise Keywords Across the Funnel Without Spreading Too Thin

One of the legitimate pushbacks on full-funnel keyword strategies is resource. If you are a team of two with a content budget that covers eight articles a month, you cannot cover every stage equally. You have to make choices.

The prioritisation framework I use is built on three variables: commercial value of the keyword cluster if you rank for it, competitive difficulty of ranking, and the gap between your current coverage and the buyer’s experience you have mapped. The intersection of high commercial value, achievable difficulty, and an existing gap in your coverage is where you invest first.

For most businesses, this means starting with consideration-stage content. Awareness-stage content takes longer to convert and is harder to attribute. Decision-stage content is where you are probably already investing. Consideration-stage content, the comparisons, the how-to-choose guides, the methodology explainers, sits in a middle ground that is often underserved and converts better than pure awareness content while being less competitive than transactional terms.

Once you have built out consideration-stage coverage, extend upwards into awareness. This is where the long-term compounding value of content marketing lives. Awareness-stage articles that rank for problem-oriented queries keep generating qualified traffic for years. They are slower to pay off, but the return on investment over a three-year horizon is often higher than any bottom-funnel keyword investment.

BCG’s work on scaling agile marketing operations is relevant here. The principle of starting with the highest-value, most achievable work and iterating applies directly to content strategy. You do not need to build the perfect full-funnel content map before you publish anything. You need a clear prioritisation logic and the discipline to follow it.

Measuring Whether Your Buyer experience Keyword Strategy Is Working

This is where honest measurement matters more than optimistic attribution. Upper-funnel keyword content will not show up cleanly in last-click conversion reports. If you measure its success by direct revenue attribution, you will always conclude it is not working and cut it. That is the wrong measurement frame.

What you can measure is organic traffic growth by stage, engagement signals (time on page, scroll depth, return visits), and assisted conversions in multi-touch attribution models. You can also measure share of voice across keyword clusters by stage, which tells you whether you are present in the conversations buyers are having before they are ready to buy.

I spent a significant part of my agency career arguing against the idea that if you cannot measure it precisely, it does not count. That logic leads to under-investment in exactly the activities that build durable competitive advantage. The goal is honest approximation, not false precision. You do not need to prove that a specific awareness-stage article caused a specific sale. You need to demonstrate that your organic presence at the awareness and consideration stages is growing, that it is reaching the right audiences, and that those audiences are moving through your funnel at a higher rate than cold traffic.

Tools like Hotjar can add a qualitative layer here. Understanding how readers engage with upper-funnel content, where they drop off, what they click next, gives you signal that pure keyword ranking data does not. Combine behavioural data with ranking and traffic data and you get a much more honest picture of whether your buyer experience keyword strategy is doing what it should.

There is also a role for first-party data here. If you can track which content pieces appear in the browsing history of your highest-value customers, you start to build an empirical picture of which awareness and consideration content actually contributes to pipeline. That is not perfect measurement, but it is far more useful than assuming upper-funnel content does nothing because last-click attribution says so.

If you are thinking about how buyer’s experience keyword research connects to broader revenue and pipeline strategy, the frameworks covered in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub are worth working through. Keyword strategy does not exist in isolation from how you structure your go-to-market motion.

The One Thing Most Teams Get Wrong at the Start

I have seen this in agencies, in-house teams, and in the work that comes across my desk for review. Teams start buyer’s experience keyword research by opening a keyword tool and typing in their product category. Everything that follows from that starting point is bottom-funnel by design, because the tool is seeded with a purchase-stage term.

The fix is to start with your customer, not your product. Before you open any tool, write down every question a buyer might ask in the six to twelve months before they are ready to purchase. Talk to your sales team about the conversations they have with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. Talk to customer success about the problems customers had before they found you. Read your own customer reviews and look for the language people use to describe the problem, not the solution.

That process takes a few hours. It produces a seed list of thirty to fifty problem-oriented phrases that you then run through your keyword tools to find search volume, related terms, and competitive landscape. The keyword research that follows is richer, more differentiated, and more strategically useful than anything you would have produced by starting from the product category.

It also tends to produce content that is genuinely useful to readers, which is the only sustainable basis for organic search performance. Search engines have become very good at identifying content that answers real questions from real people versus content that was built to rank for a term. Starting from the buyer’s actual questions keeps you on the right side of that distinction.

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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