Why the words matter more than the volume
Every business has an internal vocabulary and every customer has a different one. Google only connects the two if your page uses the customer’s. The gap is usually wider than owners expect.
| What the business calls it | What the customer types |
|---|---|
| Hard landscaping solutions | driveway cost |
| Search engine optimisation consultancy | seo agency manchester |
| Site maintenance package | website maintenance |
| Digital growth retainer | how to increase website traffic |
| Bespoke digital experiences | website design cost |
Source: Cybrial. The right-hand phrases carry measurable monthly demand; the left-hand ones, the kind found on agency and trade sites, record none.
Step one: the seed list
Write down the ten things you sell, as a customer would say them on the phone. Not the brochure name. Then add: the towns you cover, the problems you solve (“blocked drain”, “slow website”, “no enquiries”), and the questions you get asked every week. Thirty to fifty lines is a good seed list.
Step two: let Google expand it
- Type each seed into Google slowly and write down the autocomplete suggestions. They are real searches, ranked by popularity.
- Read the “People also ask” box and the “Related searches” at the bottom. Every one is a question or phrase people type.
- Read the titles of the top five results. If they all say “X near me” and you say “X services”, you have learnt something.
- Do it in a private window, or the results will be shaped by your own history.
When we did this for our own site, Google’s suggestions surfaced two phrases with real demand and almost no competition that we had not thought of, and both are now the target of a page. That is the normal result: the customer’s phrasing is rarely the one you would have guessed.
Step three: check volume and difficulty
Google Keyword Planner is free inside a Google Ads account (you do not need to run adverts) and gives monthly search volumes for the UK, or for Greater Manchester if you set the location. Volumes are rounded and averaged over twelve months, so treat 50 and 70 as the same and 50 and 500 as different.
Difficulty is how hard it is to rank, and the free way to judge it is to look at who ranks now. If the top ten are national brands and directories, it is hard. If they are small local sites with thin pages, it is winnable. Paid tools give a difficulty score; it is useful, not necessary.
Step four: sort by intent, and throw most of it away
This is the step the tools skip and the one that saves you from writing pages nobody who reads them will buy from. When we pulled every question-shaped search around websites and SEO in the UK, we got several thousand phrases and well over a million monthly searches. Most of it was not a buyer: how to clear website history on an iPhone, how to Harvard-reference a website. Stripped to business owners, roughly a fifth remained.
| The phrase contains… | The searcher is… | Make it a… |
|---|---|---|
| price, cost, quote, near me, installer, company, agency, [your town] | Ready to buy | Service or location page |
| how to, what is, why, should I, vs | Learning before buying | Guide, answered in the first paragraph |
| free, DIY, template, download, tutorial | Doing it themselves | Usually drop it, or a guide that ends with when to hire |
| iPhone, Chrome, reference, history, login, [a brand that is not you] | A consumer, a student or someone else’s customer | Drop it |
Source: Cybrial’s own filter, applied to our question-keyword research of 5 September 2026.
Step five: one phrase family, one page
Google records every phrasing separately — “how to make a website”, “how can I build a website”, “how making website” — but ranks one page for the whole family. Group the phrasings, pick the most natural one for the title, and use the others in the body. Ten clean pages beat forty overlapping ones, and overlapping pages compete with each other.
For each page, the title carries the phrase and the place in under 60 characters, the first paragraph answers the search directly, and the People Also Ask questions become subheadings. That is most of on-page SEO, and it follows straight from the research.
How often to redo it
Quarterly is plenty for a small business. Search Console will show new queries appearing as the site grows, and those are the cheapest additions to the list. The seed list changes when the business does — a new service, a new town — and not otherwise.
