Choosing Keywords: What Most Marketers Get Wrong

Choosing keywords is not a technical task dressed up as strategy. It is a commercial decision about where you want to compete, who you are trying to reach, and what stage of the buying process you are actually targeting. Get that wrong and no amount of search volume data will save you.

Most keyword strategies fail not because marketers lack access to tools, but because they conflate what is easy to rank for with what is worth ranking for. Those are very different questions.

Why Keyword Choice Is a Strategic Decision, Not a Technical One

I spent years watching agency teams run keyword research as if it were a procurement exercise. Pull the data, filter by volume, sort by difficulty, hand to the content team. Repeat. The output looked thorough. It rarely produced growth.

The problem is that keyword tools give you data about search behaviour. They do not tell you which searches represent real commercial opportunity for your specific business, at your specific stage of growth, with your specific competitive position. That interpretation requires judgment, and judgment requires understanding the business you are actually trying to grow.

When I was running agency teams across 30-plus industries, one of the first things I noticed was how often the keyword strategy reflected what the marketing team was comfortable with, rather than what the business actually needed. B2B clients would chase head terms with enormous volume and almost no purchase intent. E-commerce brands would target branded competitor terms they had no realistic chance of converting. Everyone was busy. Almost no one was asking whether the work was connected to a commercial outcome.

Keyword strategy sits inside a broader set of go-to-market decisions. If you are thinking about how search fits into your growth architecture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider picture, including how channel selection, audience targeting, and messaging hierarchy all connect.

What Search Intent Actually Means in Practice

Search intent is one of those phrases that gets used constantly and understood rarely. The standard breakdown, informational, navigational, commercial, transactional, is a useful starting point. But in practice, the more useful question is: what does someone who searches this term actually want to do next?

Take a term like “project management software.” The volume is significant. The intent is genuinely mixed. Some searchers are researchers doing early-stage category exploration. Some are in active evaluation mode. Some are existing users looking for feature comparisons. A single page cannot serve all of them equally well, and trying to do so usually means serving none of them particularly well.

The keyword selection decision, then, is really a question about which part of that audience you are trying to reach, and what you want them to do when they land. That question cannot be answered by a tool. It has to be answered by someone who understands the commercial model.

Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance. I was drawn to the measurability of it. Someone searches, someone clicks, someone converts. Clean. Attributable. Easy to defend in a client meeting. What I came to understand over time is that a significant portion of those conversions were going to happen regardless. You were not creating demand. You were showing up for demand that already existed, often for an audience that was already close to buying. That is useful, but it is not growth. It is harvesting.

Real growth requires reaching people who were not already looking for you. And that means thinking about keywords that sit higher in the consideration cycle, terms where intent is less explicit but the audience is larger and, in many cases, more shapeable.

The Volume Trap and Why Small Numbers Are Often Better

There is a persistent bias in keyword strategy toward volume. High search volume feels like proof of demand. It feels like justification. In client presentations, a keyword with 40,000 monthly searches looks more impressive than one with 400. But that logic breaks down quickly when you think about what you are actually trying to achieve.

A term with 400 monthly searches and very specific purchase intent, say “enterprise HR software for remote teams under 500 employees,” will outperform a generic term with 40,000 searches in almost every commercial metric that matters: conversion rate, revenue per visitor, customer lifetime value. The audience is smaller, but it is far more qualified.

This is not a new insight. But it is one that gets ignored repeatedly because the incentive structures inside marketing teams often reward visible effort over commercial outcome. Targeting a high-volume term feels ambitious. Targeting a narrow, specific term feels like you are not trying hard enough. That perception is wrong, and it costs businesses real money.

The better framing is expected commercial value per keyword, not raw search volume. That means thinking about the realistic conversion rate for a given term, the average order value or contract value of the customers it will attract, and the competitive cost of ranking for it, whether that cost is measured in link acquisition, content production, or paid spend.

Some of the most effective keyword strategies I have seen were built almost entirely on low-volume, high-specificity terms. One B2B client we worked with had been chasing category-level head terms for two years with minimal traction. We shifted the strategy toward very specific use-case terms, built content around actual customer problems, and within six months their organic pipeline had more than doubled. The traffic numbers were modest. The revenue impact was not.

How to Build a Keyword Cluster Instead of a Keyword List

Modern search strategy is built around topic authority, not individual keyword rankings. Google’s ability to understand semantic relationships between terms means that ranking for a single keyword in isolation is increasingly difficult and increasingly insufficient. What works is building clusters: groups of related terms that together signal comprehensive expertise on a topic.

A keyword cluster typically has a pillar term at the centre, a broad, moderately competitive phrase that defines the topic, and a set of supporting terms around it. Those supporting terms might be questions, subtopics, use cases, comparisons, or variations in phrasing. Each supporting term gets its own piece of content, and that content links back to the pillar. The result is a content architecture that signals topical authority across an entire subject area, not just a single phrase.

The practical implication for keyword selection is that you are not choosing individual terms in isolation. You are choosing a topic territory to compete in. That is a bigger decision, and it requires thinking about where you have genuine expertise, where your content team can produce something credible, and where the competitive landscape gives you a realistic path to visibility.

Tools like Semrush are useful for mapping these clusters. You can see how terms relate to each other, identify gaps in your existing content coverage, and understand where competitors are strong and where they are thin. Semrush’s analysis of growth strategies is worth reading if you want to understand how content and search intersect with broader commercial growth models. The tools are genuinely useful. The mistake is treating their output as a strategy rather than as raw material for one.

Competitive Keyword Analysis: What You Should Actually Be Looking For

Competitive keyword analysis is often done too superficially. Most teams look at what competitors rank for and try to replicate it. That is a following strategy, not a growth strategy. It assumes your competitors made good decisions, which is a significant assumption.

The more useful approach is to look for gaps: terms where there is genuine search demand, where competitors are ranking with thin or outdated content, and where you have the expertise to produce something meaningfully better. Those gaps are where you can build a durable competitive advantage in search, rather than entering a fight against established content with more links and more authority.

It is also worth paying attention to terms where competitors rank but are clearly not the best answer. Search results pages are full of content that ranks on authority rather than quality. If you can identify a term where the top results are weak, where the content is generic, outdated, or clearly written for search engines rather than for people, that is a genuine opportunity. You do not need to outrank an authoritative competitor. You need to outrank the current result, and sometimes that bar is lower than it appears.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation and go-to-market strategy makes a point that applies directly here: sustainable competitive advantage comes from doing something distinctively well, not from doing the same thing slightly better. That logic holds in keyword strategy. Chasing the same terms as your competitors, with similar content, is a race to mediocrity.

The Customer Language Problem

One of the most consistent mistakes I see in keyword strategy is the gap between how businesses describe their products and how customers actually search for them. Internal language, shaped by product teams, sales decks, and industry jargon, almost never matches the language real customers use when they are trying to solve a problem.

I have seen this play out in almost every sector I have worked in. A financial services client who talked about “wealth preservation solutions” when their customers searched for “how to protect savings from inflation.” A software company that optimised for their product category name when customers were searching for the specific problem the product solved. A healthcare brand that used clinical terminology when patients used plain, sometimes imprecise language.

The fix is straightforward in principle and harder in practice. You need to get outside the building. Talk to customers. Read reviews, forum threads, support tickets, and sales call transcripts. Look at the language people use when they are not trying to sound professional. That is the language they use when they search.

Forrester’s research on intelligent growth models consistently points to customer understanding as the foundation of effective go-to-market strategy. Keyword research is a form of customer research. It tells you what people are thinking about, how they frame problems, and what language they use when they are not in a meeting room. Treating it as a purely technical exercise means missing most of its value.

There is also a seasonal and contextual dimension to customer language that gets overlooked. The way someone searches for a product in January is not the same as how they search in November. The language shifts, the intent shifts, and the competitive landscape shifts. A keyword strategy that is set once and reviewed annually is not a strategy. It is a snapshot that ages badly.

Paid vs. Organic: How Keyword Strategy Differs Across Channels

Keyword strategy is not the same exercise for paid search as it is for organic. The mechanics are different, the economics are different, and the competitive dynamics are different. Treating them as identical leads to poor decisions in both channels.

In paid search, you are buying visibility immediately. The keyword selection decision is therefore much more tightly connected to conversion economics. Cost per click, conversion rate, and customer lifetime value need to work together as a coherent unit. A keyword that generates volume but does not convert at a margin that supports the bid is not a keyword worth buying, regardless of how strategically interesting it looks.

In organic search, the economics are different. You are investing time and content production cost upfront, with returns that compound over time. The selection criteria should therefore weight long-term value more heavily. A keyword that is hard to rank for today but represents a significant audience in your target market might be worth pursuing over twelve months even if it produces no traffic in the first quarter.

The interaction between paid and organic is also worth thinking about. Running paid on a term while you build organic authority is a reasonable short-term strategy. Using paid data to validate which organic terms are worth investing in is genuinely useful. The mistake is treating the two channels as entirely separate programmes with no shared intelligence.

Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder now touches on something relevant here: the fragmentation of attention across channels means that no single channel strategy is sufficient. Keyword strategy, whether paid or organic, needs to sit inside a broader understanding of how your audience moves through the buying process and where search fits in that experience.

How to Prioritise Keywords When You Cannot Do Everything

Most marketing teams have more keyword opportunities than they have capacity to pursue. Prioritisation is therefore not optional. It is the job. And it requires a framework that goes beyond sorting by search volume.

The framework I have found most useful combines four factors. First, commercial relevance: how closely does this keyword align with a product or service that generates revenue? Second, competitive feasibility: given your current domain authority, content capability, and link profile, can you realistically rank for this term in a timeframe that matters? Third, intent alignment: does the search intent match what you can actually deliver on the landing page? Fourth, strategic fit: does this keyword support the broader narrative you are trying to build in the market, or is it a distraction?

That last factor is underrated. Keyword strategy is also brand strategy. The topics you rank for shape how your brand is perceived in the market. A professional services firm that ranks for a broad set of generic business advice terms is building a different brand than one that ranks for highly specific, technical terms in a narrow vertical. Both can be valid. But the choice should be deliberate, not accidental.

When I was growing an agency team from around 20 people to over 100, one of the things that changed was how we thought about our own keyword strategy. Early on, we chased volume because we needed visibility. As we grew and our positioning became clearer, we shifted toward a tighter set of terms that reflected where we genuinely wanted to compete. The traffic numbers went down. The quality of inbound enquiries went up significantly. That is what happens when keyword strategy is connected to commercial intent rather than just search metrics.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy in financial services makes a point that generalises well: the most effective commercial strategies are built around a clear understanding of which customer segments matter most, not around capturing the broadest possible audience. The same logic applies to keyword selection. Breadth is not a strategy. Focus is.

Keyword strategy does not exist in isolation. It is one part of a broader set of decisions about how you grow. If you want to think about how search fits into your wider commercial architecture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture, from channel prioritisation to audience segmentation to how you connect marketing activity to revenue outcomes.

Measuring Whether Your Keyword Strategy Is Working

Keyword ranking reports are the most commonly produced and least useful form of search reporting. A position-one ranking for a term that generates no commercial value is not a success. A position-seven ranking for a term that consistently drives qualified pipeline is worth far more. The metric should match the objective.

The metrics that actually matter depend on what you are trying to achieve. If the goal is lead generation, you care about organic sessions from target keywords, conversion rate from those sessions, and the quality of leads generated. If the goal is brand visibility in a new market, you care about share of voice across a defined topic set. If the goal is reducing paid search spend by building organic coverage, you care about which paid terms you can switch off as organic rankings improve.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which means I have spent time evaluating marketing effectiveness at a serious level. One thing that stands out consistently in the work that wins is the clarity of the connection between the marketing activity and the business outcome. The campaigns that fail to make the shortlist are almost always the ones where the team can demonstrate activity but cannot demonstrate impact. Keyword strategy is no different. Ranking is activity. Revenue, pipeline, and qualified audience growth are impact.

Forrester’s work on agile marketing operations is relevant here. The organisations that measure well are the ones that have connected their marketing metrics to business metrics before they start, not after. Keyword strategy measurement works the same way. Decide what commercial outcome you are trying to drive, then build your measurement framework backward from that outcome.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions