Last reviewed: May 2026
The Volume Trap
Most keyword research starts and ends with search volume. The thinking is intuitive: more searches per month means more potential traffic, more potential traffic means more potential customers. So target the highest-volume queries you can find, work towards ranking for them, count traffic as it grows.
The reasoning falls apart in practice. High-volume queries are usually competitive (lots of established sites already ranking), broad in intent (people searching for a thousand different reasons, only some of them commercial), and slow to deliver (months or years to rank meaningfully). A local service business chasing "accountant" or "plumber" as its primary keyword target is fighting a war it cannot win, while ignoring the queries that would actually bring customers tomorrow.
The Three Things That Actually Matter
When we pick keywords for a local service business, three factors weigh more heavily than raw volume:
1. Intent
What is the person searching this query trying to do? "Accountant" is impossibly broad: students researching the profession, businesses comparing options, journalists writing articles, people looking up the spelling. "Self-assessment tax return accountant Surrey" is unambiguous: someone needs a tax return done, in their area, from someone with relevant expertise. The second has a fraction of the volume but a multiple of the conversion rate.
Intent is the single biggest filter. A keyword with 50 monthly searches and clear commercial intent often delivers more revenue than a keyword with 5,000 searches and ambiguous intent.
2. Competition you can realistically beat
Volume without competitive analysis is meaningless. A keyword with 1,000 monthly searches and ten established competitors with strong sites is harder to win than a keyword with 100 monthly searches and a top 10 made up of weak template sites and aggregator listings.
We look at the actual top 10 for any candidate query: who is ranking, what their site looks like, what their authority signals are, how substantive their content is. If the top 10 is genuinely beatable by a substantively better page within a realistic timeframe, the keyword is in. If the top 10 is dominated by national brands or directory sites with overwhelming authority, it goes in the "long-term aspiration" bucket rather than the immediate target list.
3. Match to your conversion economics
Different services have different conversion rates from organic traffic, and different lifetime values when they convert. A keyword that brings in five enquiries per month for a £10,000 service is worth more than a keyword that brings in 50 enquiries per month for a £100 service. The right target list reflects that.
Most keyword research ignores this entirely. A target list optimised purely for traffic ends up bringing the right kind of attention to the wrong kind of pages, and the conversion rate disappoints.
Keywords Local Businesses Usually Overlook
Once you stop chasing the highest-volume queries, a different category of keyword becomes available. The ones we see local businesses miss most often:
- Question queries: "how much does a self-assessment tax return cost in Surrey", "when do I need to register for VAT", "what is an EICR and do I need one". High commercial intent, often low competition because most service businesses do not bother to publish answers.
- Pricing queries: people who search for prices are people who are going to spend money. Most local businesses refuse to publish pricing, leaving these queries to be captured by directories and competitors who do.
- Comparison queries: "X vs Y", "alternatives to X", "best X for [situation]". Slightly later in the buying process, very high intent.
- Town-specific service queries: "[service] [town]" for every Surrey town you genuinely cover. Volume per town is small but combined volume across towns is significant.
- Problem-statement queries: "why is my [thing] doing [problem]". People with problems are people looking for someone to solve them. Easier to rank for and easier to convert.
How We Build the Final List
The output of the research phase is a target keyword list grouped into three buckets:
- Quick wins: commercial intent, beatable competition, can plausibly rank within 3 months. These are the pages we build first.
- Medium-term targets: commercial intent, decent competition, will take 6 to 12 months of focused work. The bulk of the ongoing effort.
- Strategic aspirations: high-volume head terms that will only rank after meaningful authority is built. Not the immediate target but informs longer-term content planning so the work compounds.
Each keyword is mapped to a specific page (existing or new) so the list is immediately actionable rather than abstract.
Why This Matters
The cost of getting keyword targeting wrong is months of content and optimisation effort going to pages that will never rank for queries that would never have converted anyway. The cost of getting it right is exactly the same effort, applied to pages that bring in real customers. The work between "working on SEO" and "working on the right SEO" looks identical from the outside; the results look very different a year later.