By Milod · 12 August 2026 · 1 min read · Strategy

Choosing keywords you can win

Volume is the least useful number on the screen. Here's what to look at instead when your site is young.

A keyword with 20,000 searches a month is worthless to you if the first page is three encyclopaedias and two sites with ten years of links. The question is never how big the term is. It is whether the current first page contains a gap you can fill.

Read the results page before the metrics

Open the search and look at what is ranking. If every result is a large brand's pillar page, that term is a two-year project. If two of the ten are thin forum threads or outdated posts, that is an opening, whatever the difficulty score says.

Match the intent that's already winning

If the page is full of comparisons, a how-to guide will not break in, however good it is. The results page tells you the format the engine has decided the query wants. Argue with it and you lose.

Prefer terms with a buyer at the end

• "best X for Y" and "X vs Z": fewer searches, far more revenue per visit.
• "how to fix …": good for trust, slow to convert, cheap to rank.
• Bare category terms: expensive, competitive, usually not worth an early bet.

Cluster, don't scatter

Eight articles around one narrow topic beat eight articles about eight unrelated things. The cluster gives you internal links that make sense, and it gives engines a reason to treat you as a source on that subject rather than a site that mentioned it once.