A 40,000-volume head term you'll never rank for is worth less than forty long-tail queries your buyers actually type. We score every candidate on intent, difficulty relative to your authority, and what the SERP already rewards.
Three patterns account for most of the keyword research work we take on. If one of them is yours, the audit will confirm it in a fortnight.
We rank for terms that never convert.
Informational intent was mapped onto commercial pages. The fix is separating the two and letting each page target the intent it can satisfy.
Intent re-mappingOur keyword list is a 5,000-row spreadsheet.
Volume exports aren't research. We filter to what you can realistically win in the next two quarters and drop the rest, permanently.
Winnability filterTwo of our pages compete for the same term.
Cannibalisation splits signals and caps both pages. We consolidate, canonicalise or redifferentiate depending on which is cheaper.
Cannibalisation mapSequenced deliberately — each phase depends on the one before it. Numbering here means order, not decoration.
Benchmarks, not promises. Your starting point decides how far and how fast — the audit gives you both numbers before you commit to anything.
Share of a raw export that typically survives filtering. The rest is noise.
Volume, intent, winnability and business value — weighted per market.
One primary term per page, which is how you avoid cannibalisation.
Benchmarks reflect the standards we work to, not guaranteed outcomes.
All of them plus Search Console, because each tool's volume estimates disagree and the disagreement is informative. Search Console is the only source showing what you personally already surface for, which is where the fastest wins hide.
Separately. US, UK, Australian and Canadian SERPs return different competitors, different volumes and sometimes different intent for identical phrasing. Running one list across four markets is how sites end up ranking nowhere in particular.
If your domain is young, the honest answer is that head terms are off the table for a year or more. We aim at long-tail commercial queries where the top ten is weak, build authority from those wins, then move up. It isn't glamorous and it works.
The core mapping is a one-off that lasts six to twelve months. Quarterly refreshes catch new competitor terms, seasonal shifts and queries you've started surfacing for since. Full re-research is rarely needed inside a year.
Keyword Research rarely runs alone. These are the three we most often run alongside it.
Topic clusters, content audits and E-E-A-T writing built to rank and to convert.
Explore →FoundationScreaming Frog, Search Console and Semrush read together, ending in a ranked fix list.
Explore →ScaleComparison pages, integration content and bottom-of-funnel pages that produce trials.
Explore →No obligation, no sales sequence. We'll show you what's actually holding your keyword research back and what it would take to fix it.