Chasing the big keyword is the most common way a small marketing budget gets spent badly. The searches worth having are longer, smaller, and much easier to reach.
Key takeaways
- Around half of all searches use four or more words, and those longer queries are far less contested than the short ones.
- Longer queries usually signal a specific problem, which is why they convert better despite lower volume.
- A local business cannot outspend a national chain on a broad term, but it can out-cover them on a hundred narrow ones.
Almost every clinic that has ever spoken to a marketing agency has been shown a number for how many people search their main term each month. Dentist plus city name. Twelve thousand searches. It is a compelling slide.
It is also, for most independent clinics, the least useful term to fixate on. It is the one every competitor and every corporate group is buying, the intent behind it is vague, and the people typing it are usually browsing rather than booking.
The shape of how people search
Analysis of large keyword datasets consistently finds that queries have got longer and more conversational, with roughly half now running to four words or more. The average query sits around three to four words.
That has been drifting for years and assistants have accelerated it, because people type differently when they expect a sentence back. Nobody types "physiotherapist London" into an assistant. They type "my knee hurts when I run downhill, who should I see in London."
Why long queries are the winnable ones
Three reasons, and they stack.
Almost nobody is competing for them. A national chain optimises for the head term. Nobody at head office is writing a page about whether it is normal for a crown to feel high for a few days. That page is available to whoever writes it.
The intent is unambiguous. Someone searching a four-word symptom question has a problem right now. Someone searching a one-word category might be doing research for an essay. The conversion difference between those two visitors is not marginal.
They are how you eventually reach the head term anyway. A site that covers fifty specific questions about dentistry accumulates the kind of topical standing that makes the broad term reachable. Attacking the broad term directly from a five-page site rarely works.
You cannot outspend a national group on the obvious term. You can out-cover them on a hundred that they will never bother to write.
What this looks like on your website
Instead of one page called "Our services", a page for each service. Instead of a paragraph mentioning that you treat sports injuries, a page about returning to running after a knee injury, and another about shoulder pain in swimmers, and another about what a first assessment involves.
Each one is small. Each one might bring a handful of visits a month. Forty of them brings a steady stream of people who are already describing a problem you treat.
The obvious objection
This is a lot of pages. That is the real constraint, and it is why the approach is discussed far more than it is executed.
Writing forty specific, accurate, locally relevant pages is somewhere between forty and eighty hours of work for someone who knows the subject. Almost no clinic has that, which is why the strategy everyone agrees with is the strategy almost nobody runs.
It is also, not coincidentally, the exact shape of problem that automation is good at: high volume, repetitive structure, requires subject knowledge and a consistent voice, and benefits from being done every week rather than in a burst.