…And Keyword Tools Can Only Tell You So Much
Understanding customers at a deep level throughout their buying journey has always been at the core of good marketing. Not just their demographics or the platforms they spend time on, but how they think, what they already know before they start looking, and how that existing knowledge shapes the way they go about finding what they need.
That’s always been the principle, and it’s always been true for SEO strategies too, even if in practice it hasn’t always been applied that way.
For a long time, and for understandable reasons, SEO strategies could get away with a more shallow version of that customer understanding, because in the past, search behaviour itself has leant toward shorter, more generic, industry wide search terms.
There are a few reasons that was the case. People trusted well known terminology when they searched. Search engines were better at returning useful results when queries were simple and recognisable. As a result, a kind of shorthand developed where most of a market would funnel through a relatively small number of shared keywords, and if you ranked well for those terms you reached enough of your ICP to make the strategy work. Out of ten thousand monthly searches for a generic industry term, maybe a thousand would be your actual customer. You accepted that the other nine thousand weren’t, and the economics still made sense because the volume was there.
That model is becoming less reliable, and I feel it’s important to be transparent about why. It’s not just that AI has “disrupted” search; instead, search behaviour itself is changing in a more fundamental way. People now arrive at a search engine with more context, more existing knowledge, and more specific requirements than they used to. Whether that’s because AI tools have changed how people research their problem before then searching for solutions, or because people have simply learned over time that more specific searches return more useful results, the practical effect is the same. Searches are getting longer, more specific, and more varied – and the more specific a search becomes, the more unique it is to the individual making it. This means the old model of targeting a handful of shared high volume terms captures less and less of how your genuine customers are searching.
What Does This Look Like, In Practice?
The best way I can illustrate this is through two clients we work with; the pattern has shown up in different ways across both of them, and I think the two cases make the point better than any general description could.
With one, who is a container hire and storage business, the early strategy was built around the kind of hire and sales terminology you’d expect; obvious searches that any agency would have identified through use of a keyword tool. That was a reasonable starting point, but over time, as we developed our understanding of who was actually buying from them and what those buyers already knew when they picked up the phone, it became clear that the buyers were significantly more informed than we’d originally assumed.
These were commercial procurement managers who already knew exactly what they needed before they started searching. They knew the dimensions they needed the container to fit, they knew the spec, and so they searched with the measurements and specific requirements already in the query. When they know what they want, and they’re looking for someone who can deliver what they want, that’s how an informed buyer searches.
This sort of insight doesn’t come from a keyword tool. It resulted from back-and-forth conversations we held with the client about the kind of buyer that was actually calling them. Google Search Console data supported this afterwards, showing the site gaining impressions for longer, more specific searches, but the search volumes on those terms were too small to have shown up as opportunities in any conventional keyword research process. Gaining a more intimate understanding of the buyer first was the key that gave the data sense and logic.
We’ve seen a version of the same thing with another client, who works in commercial EV charging infrastructure. In the early days of that market, most searches were generic “commercial EV charger installation” and similar terms, since buyers were still getting to grips with what they needed. Search behaviour reflected that at first, but as the market matured, so too did the people that were searching in it. The buyers with the most prospect for conversion now arrive with specific voltage requirements and charger types already decided. They’re not searching to be educated about options, they’re searching to find someone who can install exactly what they’ve already specified. An SEO strategy that was still targeting the search behaviour of a less mature, less informed version of that market would be reaching the wrong people entirely, and you’d only know that if you’d paid close enough attention to how the market had developed.
This Is Becoming More Difficult To Ignore
The reason this matters now – more than it did some five or six years ago – is partly about AI and partly about something more straightforward. It’s no secret that AI has made the execution side of SEO faster and more accessible for everyone. Technical audits, content briefs, on-page optimisation and so on can all be done far quicker and cheaper than before, which is genuinely useful but also means that good execution is increasingly expected as standard rather than an indicator of quality. What that does is raise the ceiling for what it takes to stand out – if the floor has risen for everyone, the question of where the real value sits shifts upward too, toward the quality of the thinking that determines what you execute and why.
At the same time (and this is the part I think gets less attention), the spread of how people search across any given market is widening. The big generic keywords that once concentrated a market’s search behaviour into a manageable number of high volume terms are becoming less dominant, not because people have stopped searching, but because they’re searching with more precision and variation. Two buyers with identical needs might express that need in completely different ways, and both searches might show zero volume in any keyword tool, not because nobody is searching that way, but because the searches are too specific and too varied to aggregate into a number that registers as an opportunity.
This is where keyword research as a standalone input starts to break down. It surfaces what a lot of people have already searched for. It can’t surface what a highly informed buyer in a maturing market is searching for right now; by the time a buyer is that specific, the tool has no way of seeing it.
What We’ve Taken From This
Across the different industries and clients we’ve worked with over the years, what we carry forward into new client relationships isn’t a set of tactics that worked in a similar sector. It’s an understanding of how buyers in certain kinds of markets tend to think and behave, how that behaviour shifts as markets mature and buyers become more informed, and where the gap most commonly sits between what a client believes their customers search for and what those customers actually type.
Closing that gap is where the real strategic work of SEO now sits. The execution that follows from getting it right is faster and more accessible than it’s ever been. But the thinking that makes that execution point in the right direction still has to come from somewhere, and it can’t come from a tool that only shows you what enough people have already searched for to register as a number.
