“We want to rank for these keywords.”
It’s something we hear all the time, and on the face of it, it makes sense. You know what your business does, you’ve searched for the services you offer, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of where you’d like to appear on Google.
But there’s a problem.
Starting with keywords means you’re already jumping ahead.
Before we think about what you should rank for, we need to understand what you actually want SEO to achieve. More enquiries? Growth in a particular service? Better quality leads? Expansion into a new location?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) works much better when those questions come first.
Because anyone can give you a spreadsheet with hundreds of keywords on it. The important bit is knowing which ones are actually worth your time.
Keywords Aren’t An SEO Strategy
Keyword research is an important part of SEO. But a list of keywords isn't an SEO strategy.
There’s a big difference between saying “we want to rank for this keyword” and understanding why ranking for it would actually benefit your business.
Let’s say you find a keyword with 10,000 searches every month. It looks brilliant on a report, but what happens if the people searching for it aren’t interested in buying your product or using your service?
You could spend months getting onto page one, increase your traffic and still see very little change in enquiries.
A keyword tells you what someone is searching for. A strategy tells you which of those searches are worth chasing.
Start With The Business, Not The Search Volume
Before we open any keyword research tools, we need to understand the business.
What are you actually trying to achieve?
Maybe there’s a particular service you want to grow. Perhaps one service is much more profitable than another. You might want to reach customers in a new location or move away from a type of work that no longer makes commercial sense.
Those conversations matter because they completely change what a good keyword looks like.
If one service generates significantly more value for the business, getting 100 relevant visitors to that page could be far more useful than getting 1,000 visitors to something you don't particularly want to sell.
That's where SEO strategy comes into play. We're not trying to win a game of who can get the most traffic. We're trying to use search to support what the business wants to achieve.
The Biggest Keyword Isn't Always The Best Keyword
Search volume is useful, but it's very easy to get distracted by it.
You see one keyword getting 5,000 searches a month and another getting 200. Which one do you go after?
The 5,000 one, surely?
Not necessarily.
You need to understand why those people are searching.
Someone searching for a broad term might be looking for a definition, doing research, looking for a job or simply trying to answer a question.
Someone making a much more specific search could be actively looking for a business like yours.
That's why search intent matters so much.
We'd rather bring the right 200 people to a website than 5,000 people who take one look around and leave. Traffic might look good in Google Analytics, but if none of those visitors become customers, what has it actually achieved?
Every Keyword Should Have A Job
This is where keyword strategy becomes much more interesting.
Not every person searching for something related to your business is ready to buy, and that's fine.
Different searches happen at different stages of the decision-making process.
Take SEO audits as an example.
Someone searching “what is an SEO audit?” is probably trying to understand the subject. They're learning.
Someone searching “do I need an SEO audit?” is further along. They know what an audit is and they're considering whether it could help them.
Then you've got someone searching “SEO audit agency”. Their intent is completely different. They're actively looking for someone who can do the work.
All three searches could be valuable to us, but for different reasons.
The first might introduce someone to Surge. The second could help build trust in our expertise. The third could generate an inquiry.
That's the strategy behind the keyword.
Without that thinking, you're just collecting search terms and hoping some of them turn into customers.
More Traffic Isn't Always The Goal
This is where businesses can get caught out.
Traffic starts climbing, everyone gets excited, and the monthly SEO report looks great. Then someone asks how many additional enquiries the website generated.
Silence.
We've talked before about why increased website traffic doesn't always result in more leads, and keyword targeting can be a big reason why.
If your strategy is built around chasing the biggest search volumes available, you can end up attracting thousands of people who were never likely to become customers.
That doesn't mean informational content isn't valuable. It absolutely can be. It can build awareness, demonstrate expertise and introduce people to your business much earlier in their journey.
The important thing is knowing why you're creating it.
Strategy First. Keywords Second.
None of this means keywords don't matter. They do.
Keyword research helps us understand how people search, the language they use, how much demand exists and where opportunities might be hiding.
But it should support the strategy, not dictate it.
A good SEO strategy connects what your business wants to achieve with what your customers are actually searching for. From there, we can decide which pages need improving, what content needs creating, where technical SEO fits in and what needs to happen to build authority over time.
That's how we approach our SEO services at Surge. We don't start with a massive spreadsheet and tell you that you need to rank for everything on it. We start by understanding your business and work backwards from there.
Stop Asking “What Should We Rank For?”
Instead, start with a slightly different question:
Where could search make the biggest difference to our business?
Once you understand that, choosing the right keywords becomes much easier.
And more importantly, you know why you're targeting them in the first place.
If your current SEO strategy starts and ends with a spreadsheet of keywords, there could be a much bigger opportunity you're missing.
Speak to our SEO team and let's work out where search can make the biggest difference to your business.
