Four criteria for judging a keyword
- Volume: average monthly searches, read as an order of magnitude and adjusted for seasonality.
- Intent: what the searcher wants to do, visible on the current results page.
- Difficulty: how strong the pages on page one are, their links and their relevance.
- Value: what a visitor is worth. The top-of-page bid shown in Google Ads is a good proxy: if advertisers pay $12 a click, the query converts.
Data sources
Google Ads Keyword Planner is free but requires a set-up Google Ads account, billing details included. It provides average monthly searches, competition levels and cost estimates; accounts without active spend see volume ranges rather than exact figures. Search Console lists the real queries already showing your pages, Google Trends reveals seasonality, and tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs add difficulty estimates and the keywords your competitors rank for.
A five-step method
- List your services and your customers' problems in their own words, taken from calls, emails and reviews.
- Expand the list with Keyword Planner, Search Console and Google's suggestions.
- Qualify each query's intent by looking at the SERP.
- Group queries that share an intent and assign one page to each group.
- Prioritize by value and feasibility: a profitable, winnable query beats a huge one you cannot reach.
Common mistakes
Chasing volume alone, forgetting local modifiers such as "near me" or nearby suburbs, building one page per variant instead of one page per intent, and ignoring the queries Search Console already shows on page two, which are often the fastest wins. Another trap is trusting third-party volume estimates as exact numbers: they are models, and two tools can disagree by a factor of three.