Keyword Types Explained
The vocabulary is usually presented as one long list of types. It is actually four separate classification systems. Every search sits somewhere on all four at the same time. Once you see that, the whole subject becomes considerably simpler.
Four Systems, Not One List
Head terms, long tail, transactional, informational, branded, local. Presented as one list, these look like categories you choose between. They are not. They belong to four independent systems. Asking whether a search is long tail or transactional is like asking whether a car is fast or red.
The four systems. Length, want, name, place.
How specific the search is. What the person wants. Whether a business name is in it. And whether location affects the answer.
Why it matters that they are separate. They combine.
A search can be long tail and transactional and unbranded and local, all at once. Each system tells you something the others do not.
What the flat list causes. Wrong questions.
Businesses ask which type to target as though one label decided it. The answer always involves at least two systems, which is block nine.
Which two matter most. Length and want.
Length tells you whether you can win it. What the person wants tells you whether winning is worth anything. Those are the two filters the whole cluster runs on.
What this page is. The definitional centre.
Each system gets a section here. Each has its own guide going deeper. This page places them rather than replacing them.
What it deliberately avoids. A grid.
A table crossing four systems would be unreadable and would suggest a completeness that does not exist. Block six explains the overlap in words instead.
Sorted By Length
The first system sorts searches by how specific they are. It runs as a spectrum rather than three boxes. It is the system that tells you whether a search is realistically winnable.
Head terms. Broad and enormous.
A single service or product word describing a whole category. Made by a great many people, wanted by everybody and held by national brands, directories and publishers.
Mid tail. The middle ground.
A service with one qualification attached. Narrower than a category and broader than a situation, which makes it the point where a strong small site starts to become competitive.
Long tail. Specific and numerous.
Somebody describing their actual situation. Few people make each one and there are countless of them, which is where most small businesses should work.
Why it is a spectrum. No boundaries exist.
Nothing marks where one category ends. We publish no word count threshold, because any number would be invented and specificity matters more than length anyway.
What this system tells you. Winnability.
Roughly how contested a search is likely to be. That is genuinely useful and it is only half of the decision.
What it tells you nothing about. Value.
A long tail search can be somebody ready to spend or somebody idly curious. Length says nothing about that, which is system two.
Where this goes deeper. Its own guide.
Our long tail guide covers why specific searches are the route rather than the limit for a small business.
Sorted By What The Searcher Wants
The second system sorts by intention rather than by words. It is the one that decides what kind of page belongs at the other end, which makes it the most useful of the four for planning.
Informational. Wanting to understand.
How something works, why something happens, what a term means. The person may become a customer later or never. The page that serves them is a guide.
Navigational. Going somewhere specific.
Somebody looking for a business they already have in mind. Valuable when the name is yours and largely irrelevant otherwise.
Commercial. Weighing options.
Comparing suppliers, checking costs, working out who covers their area. A decision is forming and it has not been made, so the page that serves them helps them choose.
Transactional. Ready to act.
Arranging the job, booking, getting in touch now. The smallest group and the most valuable per search, served by a service page.
The caution. Soft edges.
Plenty of searches sit between two categories. The same words can be typed by people in different states. Forcing everything into one box loses the useful detail.
How to determine it. Read the results.
Search the phrase and see what appears, which is direct evidence rather than a guess from the wording. Our intent guide covers that technique properly.
Sorted By Whether A Name Is Involved
The third system asks whether a business name appears in the search. That splits into three cases with completely different implications. Businesses regularly confuse the value of the first with the difficulty of the second.
Your own name. Already chosen.
Somebody searching for you has decided. These convert better than anything else and the only job is being easy to find rather than losing them to a directory listing of yourself.
Why that needs attention at all. Interference.
Directories, review sites and social profiles frequently sit above a small business searching for its own name. Worth checking what somebody typing your name actually gets.
A competitor's name. Tempting and rarely productive.
Somebody searching a rival by name has usually chosen them. Appearing there is possible and the people arriving are not looking for you.
The exception. Comparison searches.
Where somebody is weighing one named business against alternatives, they have not decided. That is commercial rather than navigational and it can be worth serving.
Unbranded searches. Everything else.
Somebody describing what they need without naming anybody. This is where nearly all new custom comes from and where nearly all the research effort belongs.
Why we name no examples. Third party businesses.
Illustrating this with a real company would be using somebody else's name to make our point, so the categories are described without one.
What this system tells you. Who already knows you.
Branded demand measures recognition. Unbranded demand measures opportunity. The two should never be reported as one figure.
Sorted By Whether Place Matters
The fourth system asks whether location affects what somebody should be shown. The important part is that this applies whether or not a place is actually typed, which is the thing local businesses most often miss.
Explicit local. A place in the words.
A service followed by a town, a neighbourhood or an area name. Somebody is deliberately checking who covers where they are.
Implicit local. No place at all.
A service typed with nothing geographic attached, which still returns local results because the search engine knows where the person is. This is the larger group by far.
Why that surprises people. It looks national.
In a keyword list, a bare service term looks like an enormous national search nobody local could win. In practice each searcher sees a local set of results.
The instruction family. Near me and similar.
Phrases telling the search engine to use the searcher's position. Not something to write into a page, since they resolve to a location before anything is compared.
Genuinely national searches. The other end.
Anything delivered or done remotely, where the searcher's position changes nothing. Different competition entirely and a different exercise.
What this system changes. Where the work sits.
Strongly local searches are decided substantially outside your website, which is a different investment from writing pages.
Where this goes deeper. Its own guide.
Local keyword research covers working where the estimates stop being reliable.
How The Four Overlap
Take one search and run it through all four systems. Emergency electrician callout in a named town on a Sunday is long tail on the first, transactional on the second, unbranded on the third and explicitly local on the fourth. Four readings of one search, which together describe it completely.
What each reading contributed. Something distinct.
Winnable because it is specific. Valuable because somebody needs help now. Available because no name is involved. And decided partly by proximity because a place is named.
Change one and the others hold. The proof they are independent.
Remove the town and it becomes implicitly local while staying long tail, transactional and unbranded. Nothing else moved.
The combination that matters most. Specific and transactional.
Winnable and worth winning together. That pairing is what a small business should be building for. It is the whole method reduced to two systems.
The combination that misleads. Broad and informational.
Large volume, wide interest, almost nobody buying. It looks like the biggest opportunity on any list and it is the trap our method guide names.
The combination people underrate. Specific and informational.
Small, apparently unprofitable questions asked by people who buy later. Worth serving on their own pages rather than dismissing.
Why no grid here. It would mislead.
A table crossing four systems implies every combination is meaningful and equally likely. Most are neither. The useful ones are named above.
How to use this in practice. Four questions per search.
How specific, what do they want, is a name involved, does place matter. Four seconds each and it produces a complete reading.
Seasonal And Event Driven Searches
Some searches are described by when they happen rather than by any of the four systems. Seasonal demand cuts across all of them. For trades it can be the single most important characteristic of a subject.
What seasonal means here. Predictable rhythm.
Demand rising and falling through the year in a pattern that repeats. Heating in the cold months, drainage after heavy weather, outdoor work in the dry season.
Why it matters commercially. Timing.
A page published as demand begins is useful. The same page published at the peak arrives too late to have established itself.
What that means for planning. Build early.
Seasonal subjects need building well before the season, which is a scheduling decision rather than a keyword one.
The reporting trap. Seasons look like performance.
Traffic falling as a season ends reads as a decline. Comparing against the same period last year rather than last month is what prevents that misreading.
Event driven searches. The unpredictable version.
Demand spiking after weather, regulation changes or news. Impossible to plan and worth recognising when it happens, since the page you already have may suddenly matter.
The evergreen contrast. Steady all year.
Most service searches sit here, which is why they carry the plan while seasonal ones supplement it.
How to spot the pattern. Your own data.
A year of your own search reporting shows the shape of your year better than any estimate of it.
Where Question Searches Sit
Question searches get listed as a keyword type and they are really a shape rather than a category. A question sits somewhere on all four systems like everything else. Knowing where it usually lands is what makes the observation useful.
Where they sit on length. Long tail, nearly always.
A question contains the situation, which makes it specific by construction. That is why questions and long tail searches are so frequently the same thing.
Where they sit on intent. Usually informational.
Most questions are somebody trying to understand. Some are commercial, particularly anything asking what something costs or which option suits.
Where they sit on branding. Almost always unbranded.
People asking questions have not chosen anybody yet, which is precisely why answering them well is worth doing.
Where they sit on location. Frequently neither.
Many questions are genuinely national, since how something works does not vary by town. Some do vary locally and those are unusually valuable.
Why they earn attention. Nobody answers them.
Businesses avoid the awkward ones, so the results are frequently weak. That combination of real demand and poor answers is the best opportunity in search.
The decision they force. Page or section.
Not every question deserves its own page. Our question keywords guide covers the test for deciding.
Which Classifications Change What You Do
Not every label alters a decision. Some change what you build, some change nothing and knowing the difference stops the vocabulary becoming an end in itself.
Intent changes the page type. The biggest effect.
A guide or a service page. That decision follows entirely from what the searcher wants. Getting it wrong means a page that never appears whatever you do to it.
Length changes what you attempt. The second biggest.
Whether a search belongs on your list at all. Or on the second list for later. That is a scheduling decision with real consequences.
Location changes where the work happens. Substantial for trades.
Strongly local searches are decided largely outside the website, so effort moves from writing pages to other things entirely.
Branding changes almost nothing. Except reporting.
You cannot create branded demand through keyword work. You should never count it alongside unbranded demand as though the two were comparable.
Seasonality changes the calendar. Not the page.
It affects when to build rather than what to build, which makes it a planning input rather than a research one.
What changes nothing. The label itself.
Knowing a search is mid tail rather than long tail alters no decision. The vocabulary is for communicating rather than for deciding.
The two that decide everything. Winnable and worth winning.
Length and intent, applied together. Everything else is description.
Where Each Belongs In A Plan
Classification is only worth doing if it changes the plan. Here is where each kind of search actually goes, which turns the vocabulary into something you can build from.
Specific and transactional. Service pages.
The pages meant to produce enquiries. Built first, because they are winnable and they are what the business is paid for.
Specific and commercial. Comparison content.
Pages helping somebody choose, including what things cost and what the options suit. Second, since they feed the service pages.
Specific and informational. Guides.
Answering questions properly on their own pages, linked to the service pages for anybody who has decided. Third.
Explicitly local. Place pages, sparingly.
Only where you can write something specific about working there. Otherwise a single areas covered page does the job.
Broad and any intent. The second list.
Kept, dated and revisited once the site has standing. Deleting them loses the direction the business is heading in.
Branded. Housekeeping.
Make sure somebody searching your name finds you. That is usually a short job rather than a content project.
Seasonal. On the calendar.
Scheduled to be built ahead of demand rather than during it.
Where the numbers get examined. Their own guide.
What the figures beside all these searches actually mean is covered in our metrics guide. Everything sits on the keyword research guide.
Asking whether
a search is long
tail or transactional
is like asking
whether a car is
fast or red.
Both apply at once. How specific it is, what the person wants, whether a name is involved and whether place matters are four independent readings of the same search. The industry presents them as one flat list of types, which is why businesses believe they have to choose between labels that were never alternatives.
The four questions we ask of every search:
Only two of the four change what you build. Length tells you whether you can win it and intent tells you whether winning is worth anything.
Every guide.
One subject.
What the words mean, what the numbers in a keyword tool actually are, how to find the searches worth targeting, how to turn a list into a publishing plan and what to do when a page you relied on slips.
