A keyword is the language your customers use when they search. “Water heater repair”, “emergency dentist open saturday” and “best coffee beans for french press” are all keywords. They can be one word, but most are phrases, and many are full questions.
The word is a bit misleading. Google doesn’t match pages to keywords letter by letter anymore. It works out what the searcher means and finds pages that answer it. Keywords are still the best handle we have on that demand: they show what people want, in their own words, and roughly how many people want it.
Types of keywords
- Head terms: short and broad, like “plumber” or “coffee”. High volume, very competitive, mixed intent.
- Long-tail keywords: longer and more specific, like “tankless water heater installation cost austin”. Less volume each, but clearer intent and easier to rank for.
- Branded: include a company name, like “brightside dental hours”.
- Local: include a place or “near me”, like “dentist near me” or “plumber round rock”.
- Question keywords: “how long does a water heater last”.
Keywords can also be grouped by search intent: informational, commercial, transactional or navigational.
How to judge a keyword
Four questions decide whether a keyword is worth a page:
- Is it relevant? Would someone searching it become a customer?
- What’s the intent? Does the searcher want a guide, a comparison or a provider?
- How many people search it? Check search volume, keeping in mind local searches often show low numbers but convert well.
- Can you compete? Check keyword difficulty and look at who ranks now.
For Coastline Plumbing, “plumber” alone is a poor target: huge, vague and dominated by directories. “Slab leak repair austin” is a better one: fewer searches, but every one of them is a potential job.
Using a keyword on the page
Give each important keyword (or a tight group of related ones) one main page. Use it in the title tag, the H1, the opening paragraph and the URL where it fits naturally, then write the page to fully answer the search. Repeating it over and over doesn’t help, and makes the page worse to read.
Common mistakes
- Targeting the same keyword with several pages
- Choosing keywords by volume alone, ignoring intent and relevance
- Writing for a keyword nobody you can serve is searching for
How to research keywords
RankThat’s Keyword Research shows volume, difficulty and intent for any keyword, suggests related ideas, and lets you save them to lists and track them.