Keyword Research on a Small Budget
Keyword research sold as a service produces spreadsheets of thousands of terms. What a small business needs is a list of about twenty phrases that real customers type when they are ready to spend money. Here is how to build it without a subscription.
Start with what you already rank for
Search Console's performance report shows the queries that brought impressions to your site. Sort by impressions and read the ones with low click-through. Those are terms search engines already associate with you, and improving a page for them is faster than earning a new one.
Mine the free suggestion sources
- Search autocomplete. Type your service and stop; the suggestions are real, frequent queries.
- "People also ask" boxes, which map the questions surrounding a topic.
- Related searches at the bottom of the results page.
- Your own site search logs, if you have search. Visitors tell you exactly what they expected to find.
- Support and sales conversations, the highest-quality source there is, because it is your actual customers' phrasing.
Sort by intent, not volume
Group terms into three buckets. Ready to buy: "emergency furnace repair near me," "cost to replace a water heater." Comparing: "tankless vs tank water heater." Learning: "why is my water heater making noise." A small site should write for the first bucket first, even though those terms have lower volume, because they convert. Volume without intent is traffic that costs money to serve and buys nothing.
Check whether you can compete
Search the term and look at what ranks. If the first page is national directories and manufacturers, a local service page will struggle. If it is competitors your size, you can win. This informal check is more useful than any difficulty score for local businesses.
One term, one page
Map each priority term to a single page and make that page genuinely the best answer available. Two pages targeting the same term compete with each other, and the most common cause of a small site plateauing is five thin pages that should have been one good one.
