Most businesses choose the words on their pages by instinct, and instinct is usually close but wrong. The phrase an owner would use to describe their service is often not the phrase customers type, and the difference can be several times the search volume.
A pattern we see constantly is a page targeting “local SEO in [city]” when the same people search “SEO [city]” six times as often, at no greater difficulty. Nothing about the page was wrong except the phrase it was built around.
What local research has to account for
| Why it matters | |
|---|---|
| Word order and phrasing | “seo leeds”, “leeds seo” and “seo agency leeds” can differ several-fold in volume |
| Town versus county | County terms are often weaker than the towns inside them |
| Place names that collide | Boston, Lincolnshire competes for its own name with a US city |
| Seasonality | Heating, roofing, tourism and tax searches move predictably through the year |
| Data that jumps | Sudden volume spikes in tools can be corrections, not real demand |
| Questions people ask AI | Prompts are phrased differently from typed searches |
Volume is not the whole answer
The biggest term is not automatically the right target. A high-volume phrase with fierce competition may be out of reach for years, while a phrase a third the size with little competition can be won in months. Difficulty, commercial intent and how closely the search matches what you actually sell all weigh as heavily as the raw number.
Treat the data with some suspicion
Keyword tools estimate. When a town's search volume jumps from almost nothing to several hundred in a single month, that is more often a correction in the tool's data than a genuine surge in demand. We favour terms whose volume has been stable across a full year, and say so when a figure looks unreliable rather than building a strategy on it.
Searches and prompts are not the same
People ask AI assistants questions in full sentences — “who is a good accountant for a small limited company in Bristol” — rather than the clipped phrases they type into a search box. Research now covers both, because a page written to answer the question is what gets quoted.