Keywords Still Matter. Just Not in the Way Most Marketers Think

Keywords still matter. But the version of keyword strategy most marketers are running is about a decade out of date. The question isn’t whether to use keywords. It’s whether you understand what they actually tell you, and what they don’t.

Keywords are signals of intent. They tell you what people are looking for, in the language they use, at the moment they go looking. That’s genuinely useful information. What they don’t tell you is why, what those people actually need, or whether your product is the right answer. That gap is where most keyword strategies fall apart.

What Keywords Actually Tell You

When someone types a phrase into a search engine, they’re leaving a trace of intent. That trace is useful. It tells you the vocabulary your audience uses, the problems they’re aware of, the comparisons they’re making, and roughly where they are in a decision process. That’s not nothing. In fact, used properly, it’s some of the most commercially actionable data available to a marketer.

But there’s a version of keyword thinking that treats search volume as a proxy for business value. If 40,000 people search for a term each month, the assumption is that ranking for it will produce 40,000 opportunities. That logic has never been sound, and it’s become less sound as search behaviour has changed. People search differently now. Zero-click results, AI-generated answers, featured snippets, and voice queries have all shifted what it means to “rank” for something.

I spent years working with clients who measured SEO success by keyword rankings. Position one for a high-volume term felt like a win. And sometimes it was. But more often, the traffic that came from those rankings didn’t convert, didn’t engage, and didn’t move the business. The keyword was right. The intent behind it was wrong for what the business was actually selling.

What keywords tell you is limited by what people already know to search for. They reflect existing awareness, existing vocabulary, existing problem framing. If your product solves a problem people don’t yet know they have, or solves it in a way they wouldn’t think to search for, keyword data will underrepresent your opportunity. Sometimes significantly.

The Intent Gap Most Keyword Strategies Miss

There’s a phrase I’ve used with clients for years: search captures demand, it doesn’t create it. When someone searches for “best project management software,” they’ve already decided they need project management software. The search is the last step of a much longer process, most of which happened away from any search engine. Brand exposure, word of mouth, a colleague’s recommendation, a problem that finally became painful enough to act on. All of that happened before the search.

Earlier in my career I was heavily focused on lower-funnel performance. Keywords, bids, conversion rates. It felt precise and accountable. But over time I started questioning how much of that “performance” we were actually generating, and how much we were simply capturing intent that would have converted anyway. A person who searches for your brand by name was probably going to find you regardless. Attributing that to your keyword strategy flatters the numbers without improving the business.

This is the intent gap. Most keyword strategies are built around existing demand, the people who already know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. That’s a real audience worth serving. But it’s a finite one. Growth, real growth, comes from reaching people who aren’t searching yet. And keywords, by definition, can’t help you find them.

If your entire content and SEO strategy is built on keyword research, you’re optimising for the bottom of a funnel you’re not filling. That’s a structural problem, not a tactical one. It’s the kind of thing that looks fine in monthly reports and creates a ceiling you can’t explain.

Understanding where keyword strategy fits within a broader go-to-market approach is something I write about in more depth across The Marketing Juice’s Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub. The short version: keyword thinking belongs inside a growth strategy, not as the foundation of one.

Where Keyword Research Earns Its Keep

None of this means keyword research is a waste of time. Far from it. Used well, it’s one of the most efficient forms of audience intelligence available. The mistake is treating it as a content brief generator rather than a source of insight.

When I was running the agency through a period of rapid growth, scaling from around 20 people to over 100, one of the disciplines I tried to instil was using keyword data as a listening tool rather than a production tool. What are people actually asking? What language are they using? What comparisons are they making? What problems are they naming that we haven’t thought to address?

That kind of analysis surfaces real audience insight. The specific phrases people use when they’re confused, frustrated, or evaluating options tell you more about your audience than most survey data. The question “how do I know if my agency is ripping me off” is not just a keyword. It’s a window into a genuine anxiety that a smart marketer can address directly and build trust through.

Keyword research earns its keep in a few specific places. First, in content gap analysis: understanding what your audience is searching for that you’re not addressing. Second, in competitive intelligence: seeing where competitors are ranking and what topics they’re owning. Third, in language alignment: making sure your messaging uses the vocabulary your audience actually uses, not the internal language your business has developed. Fourth, in prioritisation: when you have more content ideas than capacity, search volume and difficulty scores help you make defensible choices about where to focus.

Tools like Semrush are genuinely useful for this kind of analysis. The mistake isn’t using them. It’s using them as a substitute for thinking rather than a prompt for it.

The Difference Between Keyword-Led and Keyword-Informed

There’s a meaningful distinction between building content around keywords and building content that accounts for keywords. The first approach starts with a keyword list and works backwards to create content that targets it. The second starts with what your audience needs to know, what you’re credible to say, and what serves your commercial objectives, and then checks whether keyword data should shape how you frame or title it.

Keyword-led content tends to be thin. It answers the literal search query, often at the expense of depth, originality, or genuine usefulness. It also tends to converge. If everyone is targeting the same keyword, they’re all reading the same keyword research tools, seeing the same data, and producing content that looks remarkably similar. That’s not a content strategy. That’s a race to the middle.

Keyword-informed content is different. It starts from a position of genuine expertise or perspective, and uses keyword data to make sure that content is findable, framed in language that resonates, and connected to real demand. The content exists because it’s worth saying. The keyword work makes sure the right people can find it.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years. The work that won consistently had one thing in common: it was built on a genuine understanding of the audience, not a surface-level reading of what people were searching for. Keyword data can tell you what people are looking for. It can’t tell you what they actually need, what would change their behaviour, or what would make your brand memorable. That requires a different kind of thinking.

When Keywords Actively Lead You Astray

There are situations where following keyword data is genuinely counterproductive. The most common one is in category creation or early-stage product marketing. If you’re building something genuinely new, nobody is searching for it yet. The keyword data will point you toward adjacent categories with existing demand, which sounds sensible but often means positioning your product as a variant of something it’s not.

I’ve seen this pattern play out in several client engagements, particularly in B2B SaaS. A product with a genuinely differentiated capability gets positioned around the highest-volume keywords in its adjacent category, because that’s where the search demand is. The result is a product that looks like everything else in the category, competes on terms it can’t own, and never builds the distinct positioning it needed. The keyword strategy was technically sound. The strategic outcome was poor.

Forrester’s work on go-to-market challenges in complex categories highlights a consistent pattern: companies that define their market positioning based on existing search categories often struggle to differentiate effectively. The demand exists, but so does every competitor, and the positioning ends up generic by design.

Keywords can also mislead on audience intent. High search volume doesn’t mean high commercial intent. Some of the most searched terms in any category are informational queries from people who will never buy. Building content to capture that traffic isn’t wrong, but it needs to be a deliberate choice about brand awareness and top-of-funnel reach, not a revenue strategy. When clients conflate traffic with pipeline, keyword-driven content strategies become very difficult to defend commercially.

There’s also the question of what keywords can’t measure. Brand perception, emotional resonance, the quality of a customer’s experience, the reputation that drives someone to search for you by name rather than by category. None of that shows up in keyword data. BCG’s research on go-to-market strategy consistently points to the importance of understanding the full decision experience, not just the moments of active search. Keywords are one window into that experience, and a narrow one.

What Good Keyword Strategy Actually Looks Like

Good keyword strategy is quiet. It doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in content that ranks well because it’s genuinely useful and clearly relevant, in messaging that uses language the audience recognises, and in a content plan that addresses real demand without being enslaved to it.

The practical version looks something like this. Start with your commercial objectives and your audience. What do they need to understand, believe, or feel in order to choose you? What problems are they solving? What alternatives are they considering? Then use keyword research to map that territory: what are they searching for at each stage of that experience, and in what volume? Where are you already visible, and where are the gaps?

From there, build content that serves the audience at each stage, uses their language, and connects to your commercial proposition. Use keyword data to make prioritisation decisions, to sense-check your titles and headings, and to make sure your content is indexed and findable. But don’t let it dictate what you say or how you think about your audience.

The teams that do this well tend to have a clear separation between the people who understand the audience and the commercial proposition, and the people who manage the technical SEO and keyword optimisation. When those two functions are the same person, keyword data tends to dominate because it’s measurable and concrete. Audience understanding is harder to quantify and easier to deprioritise. That’s a structural problem worth solving.

Vidyard’s research on GTM teams points to a consistent finding: the gap between marketing activity and revenue impact is often a symptom of teams optimising for the metrics they can measure rather than the outcomes that matter. Keyword rankings are easy to measure. Commercial impact is harder. That asymmetry shapes behaviour in ways that aren’t always visible until the business stops growing.

One practical test I’ve used with teams: for each piece of content on your plan, ask whether it would be worth producing even if it ranked for nothing. If the answer is no, the content exists to serve the keyword, not the audience. Some of that content is fine. If all of it fails that test, you have a keyword strategy masquerading as a content strategy.

The Long Tail Is Still Real, But It’s Not a Strategy

The long tail of search, lower-volume, more specific queries, has been a staple of SEO advice for years. The logic is sound: lower competition, higher specificity, better intent matching. A person searching for “B2B SaaS project management software for remote engineering teams” is further along in their decision than someone searching for “project management software.” That specificity is valuable.

But the long tail has become something of a crutch. Because long-tail keywords are easier to rank for, they’ve become the default recommendation for anyone without the domain authority to compete on head terms. The result is a vast amount of content targeting very specific queries that nobody searches for very often, producing traffic that’s too thin to be commercially meaningful.

BCG’s analysis of long-tail dynamics in B2B markets makes a point that applies directly here: the long tail is a real phenomenon, but capturing it requires scale and efficiency that most marketing teams don’t have. Spreading content across hundreds of low-volume queries is only efficient if the content production cost is very low and the conversion rate is very high. For most businesses, neither condition holds.

A more productive approach is to think in topic clusters rather than keyword lists. Identify the core topics that matter to your audience and your business, build genuine depth on those topics, and let the keyword data inform how you structure and title the content within each cluster. That approach tends to produce better rankings, better engagement, and better commercial outcomes than a strategy built on keyword volume alone.

Keywords in the Context of a Broader Growth Strategy

I started my career in an era when SEO was largely about keyword density and meta tags. The discipline has matured enormously since then. But some of the underlying mental models haven’t kept pace. The idea that you can build a growth strategy around keyword research is one of them.

Growth, in the commercial sense, requires reaching audiences who don’t know you yet, changing the minds of people who’ve dismissed you, and deepening relationships with people who already trust you. Keywords help with parts of that. They’re particularly useful for the middle section, capturing people who are actively evaluating options. They’re less useful for the first and last sections, and a strategy that ignores those sections will plateau.

The early days of my time at iProspect were instructive on this point. We were a performance-first agency, and keyword strategy was central to what we did. We were good at it. But the businesses that grew fastest were the ones that combined strong keyword-driven performance with genuine investment in brand and audience development. The keyword work captured the demand. The brand work created it. You need both, and they need to be connected.

If you’re thinking about how keyword strategy connects to your wider go-to-market approach, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the broader framework in more depth. Keyword strategy is one component. It works best when it’s embedded in a coherent view of how your business grows, not when it’s treated as a standalone discipline.

The question “do keywords matter” has a simple answer: yes. The more useful question is where they fit, what they can tell you, and what they can’t. Marketers who get that distinction right tend to build things that last. The ones who treat keyword data as the foundation of their strategy tend to build things that plateau.

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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