Keywords Examples That Show You How Strategy Works

A keyword example is a real search term used to illustrate how keyword strategy works in practice, from the intent behind a query to how it maps to content, audience, and commercial outcome. The best examples do not just show you what a keyword looks like. They show you what it means, who is searching it, and what they expect to find.

Most keyword strategy guides stop at the mechanics. This one does not. What follows are concrete examples across different keyword types, with the strategic thinking attached to each one.

Why Most Keyword Examples Miss the Point

Spend five minutes on any SEO blog and you will find keyword examples that look something like this: “best running shoes” (high volume, commercial intent), “how to tie a bowline knot” (informational, low competition). Technically accurate. Strategically useless.

The problem is not the examples themselves. It is that they are presented in isolation, stripped of the business context that makes them relevant or irrelevant to any given organisation. A keyword only matters if it connects to an audience you are trying to reach, a product you are trying to sell, and a position you are trying to own.

I spent a chunk of my career at iProspect managing search strategy across dozens of client accounts, watching teams obsess over keyword rankings while the business questions went unanswered. What are we trying to grow? Who are we trying to reach? What does someone actually want when they type this? Those questions came second, if at all. The keyword list came first, which is the wrong order.

Keyword strategy is a subset of go-to-market thinking. If you want to understand how it fits into the wider picture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub on The Marketing Juice covers the broader framework. Keywords are one input into that system, not the system itself.

The Four Keyword Types, With Real Examples

Before getting into examples, it is worth being precise about the four keyword types that form the backbone of any serious strategy. Each one represents a different stage of intent, and each one demands a different response.

1. Informational Keywords

These are searches where someone wants to learn something. They are not ready to buy. They may not even know what they want to buy. They have a question and they want an answer.

Examples:

• “what is content marketing”
• “how does programmatic advertising work”
• “why is my bounce rate so high”
• “what does a marketing director do”

The strategic value here is not direct conversion. It is audience reach and brand positioning. Someone searching “what is content marketing” is probably early in their professional development or early in their research process. If your content answers that question clearly and builds trust, you have put yourself in their consideration set before any commercial intent kicks in.

This is the part of the keyword landscape that most performance-focused teams dismiss, and it is a mistake I made earlier in my career. When I was running performance channels, I was obsessed with the bottom of the funnel. Keywords with clear purchase intent, tight cost-per-acquisition targets, and measurable return on ad spend. What I underestimated was how much of that bottom-funnel conversion was simply capturing demand that already existed, not creating new demand. Informational keywords are where you create demand. They are harder to measure and easier to deprioritise, which is exactly why most brands under-invest in them.

2. Navigational Keywords

These are searches where someone already knows where they want to go. They are using the search engine as a shortcut rather than a discovery tool.

Examples:

• “Salesforce login”
• “HubSpot pricing page”
• “Mailchimp templates”
• “Nike running shoes”

For the brand being searched, these keywords confirm existing awareness. For a competitor, they represent an opportunity to intercept, though that is a risky and often expensive game. The more interesting strategic question around navigational keywords is what they tell you about your own brand health. If your branded search volume is growing, something upstream is working. If it is flat while you are spending heavily on paid channels, you have a brand awareness problem that performance spend alone will not fix.

3. Commercial Investigation Keywords

These are searches from people who are moving toward a decision but have not made one yet. They are comparing options, reading reviews, and building a shortlist.

Examples:

• “best CRM for small business”
• “HubSpot vs Salesforce”
• “top marketing automation platforms 2024”
• “is Shopify worth it for ecommerce”

This is where content strategy and commercial strategy need to be tightly aligned. Someone searching “HubSpot vs Salesforce” is not looking for a product page. They want a comparison that helps them make a decision. If your brand is one of the options being compared, you want to be present in that conversation with content that is genuinely useful, not just promotional. If you are a third-party publishing comparison content, the commercial model is usually affiliate revenue or lead generation. Either way, the intent is clear and the content format needs to match it.

4. Transactional Keywords

These are searches from people who are ready to act. They know what they want. They are looking for the right place to get it.

Examples:

• “buy Nike Air Max 90”
• “book a hotel in Edinburgh”
• “download SEMrush free trial”
• “get a marketing audit quote”

Transactional keywords are where most paid search budgets live. They convert well because the intent is explicit. But they are also the most competitive and expensive part of the keyword landscape, and they only reach people who have already decided they want something. They do not grow your market. They capture the market that already exists. That is valuable, but it is not the whole story, and treating it as if it is will cap your growth ceiling.

Long-Tail vs Short-Tail: What the Examples Actually Show

The long-tail vs short-tail distinction is one of the most discussed in keyword strategy, and also one of the most misunderstood. The volume numbers make short-tail keywords look attractive. The reality is more complicated.

Short-tail example: “marketing” (millions of searches per month, almost no actionable intent, near-impossible to rank for, and even if you did, what would you do with the traffic?)

Long-tail example: “marketing strategy for B2B SaaS startups” (far lower volume, very specific intent, much easier to rank for, and if your business serves that audience, far more valuable)

The practical lesson: volume is a vanity metric unless it is paired with intent alignment. A keyword that sends 50 qualified visitors to a page that converts is worth more than a keyword that sends 5,000 unqualified visitors who bounce in eight seconds. I have seen this play out repeatedly across client accounts, particularly in B2B where the purchase decision is complex and the buyer experience is long. The long-tail terms that look underwhelming in a keyword report are often the ones driving the most pipeline.

Tools like SEMrush and Crazy Egg both cover keyword research in the context of growth strategy, and they are useful starting points for understanding the mechanics. But the mechanics are the easy part. The hard part is deciding which keywords matter for your business and why.

Keyword Examples by Industry: What Strategy Looks Like in Context

Abstract keyword examples only get you so far. Here is what keyword strategy looks like when it is applied to specific business contexts.

B2B SaaS

A project management software company might build its keyword strategy around three layers:

• Informational: “how to manage remote teams”, “what is agile project management”, “how to write a project brief”
• Commercial: “best project management software for agencies”, “Asana vs Monday vs Trello”, “project management tools for small teams”
• Transactional: “Asana free trial”, “Monday.com pricing”, “project management software demo”

The informational layer builds an audience of people who manage projects but may not yet be in the market for software. The commercial layer reaches people who are actively evaluating. The transactional layer captures people ready to start. A brand that only invests in the transactional layer is fighting over a small, expensive pool of buyers. A brand that invests across all three is building compounding reach.

Financial Services

Financial services is a category where keyword strategy intersects with regulatory compliance, which adds a layer of complexity most other industries do not have. But the intent framework still applies.

• Informational: “how does a stocks and shares ISA work”, “what is compound interest”, “should I pay off debt or invest”
• Commercial: “best cash ISA rates 2024”, “cheapest investment platform UK”, “which mortgage lender is easiest to get approved”
• Transactional: “open an ISA online”, “apply for a personal loan”, “get a mortgage quote”

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy in financial services makes the point that understanding the evolving needs of different customer segments is foundational to any growth strategy. Keyword research is one of the most direct ways to understand those needs at scale, because it shows you what people are actually asking, not what you assume they care about.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce keyword strategy tends to be heavily transactional by default, which is understandable but limiting. A fashion retailer might focus almost entirely on product-level keywords: “women’s linen trousers”, “men’s slim fit chinos”, “oversized cotton shirt”. Those keywords are valuable. But they only reach people who already know what they want.

There is a parallel I keep coming back to from retail. Someone who tries on a piece of clothing in a store is dramatically more likely to buy it than someone who just browses the rails. The physical experience of engagement changes the probability of conversion. Informational content in ecommerce does something similar. A blog post on “how to style wide-leg trousers” or “what to wear to a summer wedding” reaches people earlier in their thinking, creates engagement, and increases the likelihood that when they are ready to buy, they come back to you. Most ecommerce brands leave this entirely to chance.

How Keyword Examples Connect to Positioning

This is where most keyword strategy guides stop short. They give you the taxonomy, the tools, the volume metrics. What they rarely address is how keywords connect to brand positioning, and why that connection matters.

Your keyword strategy is a statement of what you want to be known for. If you are a premium management consultancy and your entire keyword footprint is built around “cheap business advice” and “free strategy templates”, there is a misalignment between your positioning and your search presence. You will attract the wrong audience, generate leads that do not convert, and wonder why your cost of acquisition keeps climbing.

I saw this exact problem at an agency I ran early in my career. We had inherited a keyword strategy from a previous team that was built around volume rather than fit. We were ranking for terms that brought in enquiries from businesses with budgets a tenth of what we needed to run profitable engagements. The metrics looked healthy. The business was not. Fixing it meant rebuilding the keyword strategy from the positioning outward, not from the search volume inward.

The questions that should precede any keyword selection are: Who are we trying to reach? What do we want them to think about us? What problem are we solving for them? The keywords follow from those answers. They do not precede them.

BCG’s framework on go-to-market strategy and product launch reinforces this point from a different angle: the most successful launches are built on a clear understanding of who the audience is and what they need to believe before they will act. Keyword strategy is one of the mechanisms for reaching that audience. But the audience definition comes first.

Negative Keywords: The Examples Nobody Talks About

Any serious treatment of keyword examples has to include negative keywords, because they are just as strategically important as the keywords you target, and they are consistently underused.

A negative keyword is a term you explicitly exclude from your campaigns to prevent your ads from showing to irrelevant audiences. Examples:

• A B2B software company adding “free” as a negative keyword to exclude people looking for no-cost tools
• A premium hotel adding “budget” and “cheap” to avoid attracting price-sensitive travellers outside their target segment
• A recruitment agency adding “jobs” and “vacancies” to separate candidate traffic from client traffic
• A marketing agency adding “DIY” and “template” to avoid attracting people who want to do it themselves rather than hire

Negative keyword management is unglamorous work. It does not show up in case studies or award entries. But it is one of the fastest ways to improve the efficiency of paid search spend, because it stops you paying for clicks from people who were never going to convert. I have seen negative keyword audits on paid accounts reduce wasted spend by 20 to 30 percent without touching a single bid or creative. It is the kind of operational detail that separates teams that manage campaigns from teams that think about them.

Keyword Mapping: Connecting Terms to Pages

Keyword strategy does not end when you have a list of terms. The list has to be mapped to content, and that mapping has to be deliberate.

Keyword mapping is the process of assigning specific keywords to specific pages on your site, based on intent alignment and content fit. Done well, it prevents keyword cannibalisation (where multiple pages compete for the same term and dilute each other’s authority) and ensures that every page has a clear purpose in the search landscape.

A simple example:

• Homepage: brand + category terms (“marketing agency London”)
• Service pages: specific service terms (“paid search management”, “SEO consulting”)
• Blog posts: informational and long-tail terms (“how to brief a marketing agency”, “what to expect from an SEO audit”)
• Case studies: industry and outcome terms (“ecommerce SEO results”, “B2B lead generation case study”)

The mapping exercise forces clarity. When you try to assign a keyword to a page and find that no page on your site fits, you have identified a content gap. When you find that five pages are all targeting the same term, you have identified a consolidation opportunity. Both are valuable outputs of a process that most teams skip because it feels administrative rather than creative.

Understanding how GTM strategy connects to content and keyword planning is something Vidyard covers well in their writing on why go-to-market feels harder than it used to. The short answer is that there are more channels, more noise, and more competition for attention. Keyword mapping is one of the tools that helps you cut through that noise by being precise about what you want each piece of content to do.

Measuring Keyword Performance: What to Track and What to Ignore

Keyword performance measurement has a long history of being done badly. The metrics that are easiest to report are often the least useful for decision-making.

Ranking position is the classic example. Teams celebrate moving from position 8 to position 4 for a given keyword, and that is worth noting. But ranking position tells you nothing about whether anyone is clicking, whether the people who click are the right people, or whether any of them are doing anything useful when they arrive. It is a proxy metric at best.

What matters more:

• Organic clicks and click-through rate from search (available in Google Search Console)
• Engagement on landing pages (time on page, scroll depth, next action taken)
• Conversion rate by keyword cluster, not just by channel
• Pipeline or revenue attributed to organic search, with appropriate caveats about attribution

The attribution caveat is important. Search attribution models have real limitations. A customer who first found you through an informational blog post, then returned via a branded search three weeks later, and converted after clicking a paid ad, might be attributed entirely to paid search in a last-click model. The keyword that started the relationship gets no credit. That does not mean the keyword was not valuable. It means the measurement model has a blind spot.

I have sat in enough measurement reviews to know that most marketing teams report what is easy to report, not what is most useful to know. Tools like Hotjar can help fill in some of the behavioural gaps by showing you what people actually do on a page after they arrive from a given keyword. That qualitative layer is often more revealing than the quantitative data alone.

If you want to go deeper on how keyword strategy fits within a broader growth and go-to-market framework, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub on The Marketing Juice covers the strategic context that keyword tactics sit inside. Keywords without strategy are just a list. Strategy without execution is just a plan. The two need each other.

The Whiteboard Moment: Keywords and Strategic Confidence

Early in my career, I found myself standing in front of a whiteboard at Cybercom with a pen in my hand and a room full of people looking at me. The founder had been pulled into a client meeting and handed me the session. The brief was for Guinness. My internal reaction was something close to panic. But the work still needed doing, so I did it.

What I remember from that session is that the best ideas did not come from the most senior person in the room. They came from the person who was willing to put something on the board and defend it. Keyword strategy works the same way. The brands that win in search are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tools. They are the ones that have a clear point of view about what they want to be known for, and the discipline to build a keyword strategy that reflects it.

The examples in this article are meant to give you a starting framework. But the strategic thinking has to come from inside your business. What do your customers actually search for? What do they believe before they find you? What do you want them to believe after? Those questions are harder than any keyword tool will answer, but they are the ones worth asking.

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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