A client in Maldon once showed us a keyword with 2,400 monthly searches and asked why we weren't targeting it. Fair question. The honest answer was that the term, "boat maintenance," was being searched almost entirely by people researching DIY guides, not people looking to hire someone. Volume on its own tells you almost nothing about whether a keyword will ever put money in your till.
The Trap of Chasing the Biggest Number
Keyword research tools love showing you volume front and centre, because it's the easiest number to display and the easiest one for a client to understand at a glance. What those tools rarely show clearly enough is intent: is this person trying to learn something, trying to buy something, or trying to find a specific business they already know exists? Three completely different searches, often sharing surprisingly similar volume numbers, and only one of them tends to convert into an actual enquiry.
"Boat maintenance" pulls in hobbyists reading about engine winterisation and hull care, most of whom will never hire a marine engineer in their life. "Boat engine servicing Maldon" pulls in maybe 90 searches a month, a fraction of the bigger term's volume, but nearly every single person searching it is actively trying to find someone to do the job. We'd take the 90 every time.
How We Actually Sort Intent From Noise
We don't rely purely on gut instinct here, though experience does help spot the obvious cases quickly. We look at what's currently ranking for the term. If the top results are blog posts, guides, and forum threads, that's informational intent dominating the page and a commercial service page is unlikely to break through no matter how well it's written. If the top results are local business listings, service pages, and map pack entries, that's transactional intent, and that's where a well-optimised service page genuinely has a fighting chance.
There's a quicker shortcut too, if you don't fancy reading ten results manually every time. Look at the word count and format of whatever's ranking. A list of 2,000-word articles with headings like "Top 10 Tips" is almost always informational. A cluster of short pages with a phone number near the top, a service area, and a map embed is almost always transactional. It's a blunt heuristic, but it holds up more often than not, and it takes seconds rather than minutes to apply.
A Side-by-Side Example From Clacton
We ran this comparison for a Clacton-on-Sea driveway contractor. "Driveway ideas" gets roughly 3,600 monthly searches nationally and almost exclusively returns Pinterest boards, inspiration galleries, and design blogs. "Block paving driveway cost Clacton" gets closer to 70 searches a month and returns almost entirely local contractor pages and quote comparison sites. We built the page around the second term, not the first, despite the enormous gap in raw volume between them.
Eight months later, that page was generating roughly three enquiries a week from organic search. The contractor had previously spent money on a blog post targeting "driveway ideas" that, to this day, gets decent traffic and has never produced a single enquiry we can trace. Plenty of visits. Nothing to show for it where it actually counts.
We'd go one step further and say that blog post wasn't just ineffective, it was actively cannibalising his own marketing budget's attention. The contractor had been checking its traffic chart monthly and feeling reassured by the upward trend, while the page that was genuinely converting sat quietly underneath with a fraction of the views and almost none of the credit. Vanity metrics have a habit of hiding the page that's actually paying for itself.
Why This Matters More for Local Pages Specifically
National or broad commercial terms often have enough volume that even a small percentage converting into enquiries is worthwhile. Local pages don't have that luxury. A page targeting "electrician Billericay" might only ever see 40 to 60 searches a month total, full stop, regardless of how well it's optimised. When your total addressable search volume is that small, chasing a bigger but mismatched term elsewhere isn't a clever growth strategy, it's a distraction from the smaller pool of searches that were actually going to become paying customers.
We'd go further: for most local service businesses, the keyword with the best intent match and modest volume will outperform a high-volume, loosely-related term almost every single time, measured in enquiries rather than impressions. Impressions look good in a report. Enquiries pay the wages.
- Check what's actually ranking before assuming a keyword suits a service page
- Treat a 50-search local term with clear buying intent as more valuable than a 2,000-search informational one
- Track enquiries by page, not just traffic, to see which keywords actually convert
Where We've Seen This Go Wrong the Other Way
It's not always about avoiding high-volume terms. Sometimes a business undervalues a genuinely commercial high-volume term because it sounds too broad. A Thurrock removals company nearly skipped targeting "removals Thurrock" entirely in favour of more specific long-tail phrases, assuming the broad term was too competitive to bother with. That broad term had both decent volume and clear transactional intent, exactly the combination worth fighting for. We built the main service page around it anyway, alongside the longer-tail pages, and it became the single highest-converting page on the site within four months. Volume and intent aren't opposites; the mistake is assuming high volume automatically means poor intent, which isn't true nearly as often as people think.
What actually settled the argument for us was pulling genuine search behaviour, not just a volume number sitting in a tool. Searches for "removals Thurrock" overwhelmingly came from mobile, late evening, from people who had clearly already decided to move and were comparing quotes rather than researching the general concept of removals. That pattern alone told us more about intent than the raw search count ever could, and it's a habit worth building into proper keyword research for local businesses rather than relying on the headline number.
A Quick Gut-Check Before You Commit a Page to a Keyword
Before building or rewriting a page around any keyword, search the exact phrase yourself and look honestly at the first page of results. Are they mostly businesses like yours, or mostly content answering a general question? If it's the latter, that keyword probably belongs in a blog post, not a service page, and forcing a sales page around purely informational intent tends to produce something that satisfies neither searchers nor search engines particularly well.
This is a big part of what proper keyword strategy for Essex businesses actually involves day to day, and it's less glamorous than big volume numbers in a spreadsheet, but it's the difference between a page that gets visits and a page that gets customers.
What We Tell Clients Who Still Want the Big Number
Sometimes a client genuinely does want the bragging rights of ranking for a huge volume term, even knowing the conversion case against it. We don't usually argue them out of it entirely if budget allows for both. What we insist on is building the actual money-making page first, around the narrower, intent-matched term, and treating the high-volume page as a separate, slower-burn brand awareness project rather than the main event. Conflating the two goals onto a single page tends to satisfy neither the browser nor the buyer particularly well.
The Bottom Line
Volume is easy to measure and genuinely tempting to chase, but it's a poor proxy for whether a keyword will ever bring you a paying customer. The Clacton driveway page proved that a term with a tenth of the search volume can outperform the bigger one many times over, simply because the people searching it were already trying to buy. Chase the match between your service and real buying intent first; let volume be the tie-breaker, not the deciding factor.
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