In our experience, there are three main types of high-converting keywords:

• Category keywords, where someone’s looking for your product or product category; they’re ready to buy what you offer, and just need to be convinced that you have the solution they need. This includes searches such as ‘best crm software’ and ‘children’s hiking boots’. Plus all the variations, for example ‘best crm system’ and ‘children’s hiking shoes’.
  
  
• Comparisons and alternatives, where someone’s comparing products or services in your space. In the case of a project management software, this might be ‘trello vs asana or alternatives to zoho’. Again, the searcher is indicating their readiness to buy.
  

• Jobs-to-be-done, where someone is indicating that they want to achieve a goal or complete a task. For example, ‘how to do financial projections’, ‘best way to clean grout’, or ‘natural way to increase testosterone’.
  
  Note: To learn more about JTBD keywords, read my previous post: How to Use Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) Keywords in Your SEO Content Strategy

There are loads of opportunities within all of these categories, so you won’t be short of topics to write about—whatever industry you’re in. And as well as the clear and obvious opportunities (e.g. ‘best crm software’), there’s a not-so-obvious approach you can try, too.

We call these more obscure opportunities ‘deviant’ keywords.

Deviant keywords aren’t immediately evident, and you might even consider them ‘wrong’—but they make sense to target because they’re still likely to generate conversions for your business.

In this post, I’ll explain what deviant keywords are and show some examples of how they work.

What are deviant keywords?

Deviant keywords are keywords that seem unusual, and on first glance they’d appear to be unacceptable for you to use in your content marketing strategy. Generally, finding deviant keywords demands a certain amount of ‘outside-the-box’ thinking.

Granted, a deviant keyword does sound pretty menacing. But we can thank the Cambridge Dictionary for the neat definition that we’ve been able to use for this concept:

What are the different types of deviant keywords?

First, it’s worth outlining what I’m not talking about when I suggest targeting deviant keywords:

I’m not suggesting you write content to rank for random keywords simply to generate traffic. This can be tempting, especially if you can see your competitors’ websites getting a lot of visitors. But website traffic by itself is a vanity metric. It’s better to have modest traffic but a high percentage of visitors converting—e.g. signing up to a free trial, sending an inquiry, or calling your office—and that’s why we even target mini-volume keywords for our clients.

Deviant keywords are simply a non-intuitive or seemingly wrong way to achieve that same end: get conversions from SEO and content.

Let’s look at examples of deviant keywords in each of our three Pain Point SEO frameworks.

First, Deviant keywords can be found in category keywords (from our Pain Point SEO framework):

• Inaccurate descriptions of a product or service: People use all sorts of phrases to describe what they need, many of which aren’t technically correct. In some cases, Google will default its SERPs to the correct search, but not always. It pays to ‘meet searchers where they are’ rather than sticking to the terminology that you deem to be accurate.
  
  For example, some companies we’ve worked with have had major BoF category keywords (with high search volume = great opportunities) that are downright wrong. I’ll dig into two of these stories later in this post.
  
  
• Overestimation of needs: Sometimes people assume they need a big expensive tool when they actually need something very specific. For example, the Timetastic app is designed specifically for companies to manage staff leave. It won’t help with other HR tasks (hiring, resource planning, payroll, etc.) but for many businesses, that functionality would be overkill anyway. Many people searching ‘hr software for leave management’ don’t actually need HR software, per se—they just need something that helps them schedule and record staff leave. Thus, this would be a good deviant keyword because not everyone understands the jargon and nuances between types of software.
  

• Underestimation of needs: Our client, StrataPT, offers a complete platform for physical therapy (PT) practices, but their main functionality is billing (because reimbursement from insurance companies is a nightmare). In this case, calling their product ‘billing software’ is technically inaccurate, because it does so much more. But people searching for this keyword are still great prospects, because one of—if not the main—benefit of buying their software is to improve their billing process and collection rate. Plus, in fact, standalone billing software without the other stuff never gets the same results anyway.
  
  
• Free/Freemium: If your product isn’t free, it may feel weird to target this keyword—but there are logical angles here. If it’s a SaaS product and you offer a free subscription plan, it isn’t really a deviant keyword. And if you only offer a temporary free trial, we don’t recommend framing your product as free because that just annoys people. In this case, we’d target the ‘free’ keyword by writing a piece that highlights the pros/cons of free software (mainly the cons). For example, The Hidden Costs of Free CRM Software.

And in the comparisons and alternatives keyword group, such as:

• Non-ideal alternatives: Several marketing experts will say not to sell too hard to people who aren’t yet ‘product-aware’ because they’re not ready to buy. We think differently because, in our experience, someone who demonstrates a pain point is open to a good product or service that will solve their problem. Even when they’ve searched for something else, as long as that ‘something else’ is indicative of their pain point, you have a real chance of convincing them your solution is worth a shot instead.
  
  An example to illustrate the point: Let’s say you have a software that helps companies with staff travel (from a quick Google search, one prominent brand is TravelPerk). The keyword ‘travel request form’ is an example of a non-ideal alternative; the searcher is indicating they need something to help them to organize corporate travel (they might be an employee themselves or HR trying to formalize the process for staff). If using TravelPerk is better than processing forms manually, this is a great place to make that argument.
  
  In fact, TravelPerk has targeted this keyword with What is a business travel request form?. But in my view, they’d be better off taking a different angle: either leading explicitly with the downsides of using a travel request form, or targeting travel request form template instead—providing a template, while making the case for their alternative.

Again, this keyword is ‘wrong’ because TravelPerk is the antithesis of a template for manually managing corporate travel. It doesn’t actually describe their solution at all.

Another non-ideal alternative could be a non-ideal competitor; an example would be a tool that has a proportion of users/potential users whose needs overlap with what TravelPerk offers. This might be a software focused only on travel expenses and financial records. In that case, they might want to target a keyword like ‘payhawk alternatives’.

We did something similar for Leadfeeder, a software that helps B2B companies see what businesses are visiting their website. At that time, it was built on top of Google Analytics, and wasn’t a replacement for it at all (it doesn’t touch any traffic analytics or other core features of Google Analytics). But we targeted the term ‘google analytics alternatives’, which converted very well for them. As of now, that post (note: heavily edited since we first published it) still ranks in the top 5 spots for that keyword.

And finally, in the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) group of keywords:

• Inefficient ways of doing a job: This is pretty similar to the non-ideal alternatives (see above)—but with more emphasis on the task that needs to be completed.
  
  For example, an accounting software might want to target ‘how to create an invoice in word’ because the person searching for this is doing something arduous when they can offer a better alternative (perhaps without cost, if the feature is part of the free plan). At first this seems irrelevant because your product would have absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft Word, but actually, the searcher is telling you they want to do something in a way that you know is costing them time and energy, with substandard results.
  
  (In my post about JTBD keywords, I also mention the article we wrote for Circuit’s route planner about how to create a route for multiple destinations using Google Maps. We gave the step-by-step process for doing this while highlighting the hassle it involves, and the fact there’s a maximum limit of 10 stops. This post has generated thousands of free trial signups for Circuit because we put forward a convincing case that using Circuit is better than fiddling with Google Maps to find workarounds. More on this later.).

Again, what we’re not talking about here is targeting irrelevant keywords for the sake of getting web traffic. Deviant keywords will still generate conversions.  

When does targeting deviant keywords make sense?

Targeting deviant keywords usually makes sense when you’ve already covered all of your high-priority bottom-of-funnel keywords.

We tend to prioritize in the below order (though not always):

1. Category keywords
2. Comparisons and alternatives
3. Jobs-to-be-done keywords
4. The deviant keywords within each of the groups above

In most cases, deviant keywords can be considered ‘mid-funnel’ opportunities. In other words, they’re either demonstrating an inherently lower buying intent, or we think that the buying intent of the people searching for it is more mixed and uncertain (i.e. some want to buy, others don’t).

There are exceptions to this, however. These exceptions are mainly deviants within the category keywords. As I noted earlier in this post, inaccurate descriptions can sometimes be very high intent; the issue is simply that the searcher doesn’t have their terminology correct. In the next section of this article, I’ll give you an example of a company whose highest-intent keyword was a deviant keyword because it was a popular misconception about their technology.

But mostly, these deviant keywords are something to look at when you start to move up the funnel, after exhausting all of the keywords that are likely to give you the most conversions.

3 real-world examples of targeting deviant keywords

I’m going to wrap up this article with three examples of how we’ve embraced deviant keywords and achieved results for real-world clients.

1. Renewable heating company: Using an inaccurate category description

A few years ago, I worked with a UK-based renewable energy company that specialized in sustainable heating and cooling. Charged with growing their organic traffic and online inquiries, I started exploring BoF category keywords; the ways people described their products.

There were some pretty obvious ones that they were already targeting on Google Ads, including:

• air source heat pump
• ground source heat pump
• heat pump for cooling
• heat pump system for house

As well as some middle-of-funnel keywords, such as:

• how much does a heat pump cost
• heat pump settings for winter
• heat pump vs furnace
• how does a heat pump work

These were all good opportunities. But speaking to the sales and customer service teams uncovered something interesting: as experts in the technology, they were really frustrated that people kept coming to them asking about geothermal heat pumps.

In the UK, a geothermal heat pump means something very specific; it’s not at all suitable for residential properties (although the US seems to have adopted this term more easily). Geothermal heating is generally an industrial solution, involving drilling a massive borehole deep into the earth close to the earth’s core. Not something you’d want to do in your back garden.

This mistake annoyed the team, because they cared a lot about the technology. Yet this was the language people were using to describe what they needed.

I managed to convince them that despite the description ‘geothermal heat pump’ being erroneous, keywords like the following were worth writing content about:

• residential geothermal heat pump
• geothermal heat pump installation cost
• water to water geothermal heat pump
• best geothermal heat pump

The beauty is that many of their competitors were similarly frustrated by the popular misconception about geothermal energy and were avoiding the keywords, too. This meant they were actually much less competitive in the SERPs than the correct descriptions at the time.

The lesson here is to not be too precious about your product or service. If people are using certain language to describe their needs, it makes sense to be there for those searches. You can then use your posts and pages to explain the nuances of what they really need (if that matters).

As this was a few years ago, I unfortunately don’t have the conversion metrics for these specific geothermal keywords. But I do know that they contributed to an overall 8x growth in conversions and a growth of 3,400% in (high-intent) organic traffic over two years.

2. Cognitive FX: Embracing unwanted terminology

My colleagues, Olivia Seitz and Devesh Khanal, put together a full case study about our work with Cognitive FX: How We Grew Cognitive FX to 70,000 Pageviews in 14 Months.

Cognitive FX is a concussion treatment center based in Provo, Utah. What we haven’t highlighted in our case study is that one of their best-performing keywords—one that we’ve used across dozens of posts—is actually one their medical professionals didn’t want to use.

The doctors at Cognitive FX are not fans of the term ‘post-concussion syndrome’ because ‘persistent post-concussion symptoms’ is the most up-to-date, medically accurate description. But patients—and many in the medical community who don’t specialize in the condition—will search for post-concussion syndrome or its abbreviation, PCS.

Keywords such as ‘post concussion syndrome test’, ‘living with post concussion syndrome’, ‘what can a neurologist do for post concussion syndrome’, or ‘how to treat pcs’ are high-intent, and therefore, valuable — despite searchers using the ‘wrong’ term to describe their problem.

The articles that are targeting PCS-related terms accounted for 23% of all blog conversions in the month prior to us writing this post. According to Olivia, these articles are consistently driving 20-25% of all blog conversions on a monthly basis.

Plus, there are other opportunities around wrong—or at least strange—ways to describe the condition. For example, an article targeting ‘neuroplasticity treatment’ has consistently brought in conversions. It’s not a term their clinicians would ever use, but it’s one of the ways their target patients search for help online.

We can learn from these two companies that if you have a complex service or product—whether it’s technical, medical, financial, or something else—many people searching for it (and around it) will use terms that are wrong, ambiguous, or non-ideal. Don’t avoid these keywords. Instead, invest some time and effort in uncovering these deviant keywords.

3. Circuit: Combining JTBD with an alternative/competitor

A deviant approach to jobs-to-be-done keywords (e.g. ‘how to’ and ‘can I’ keywords) is to combine them with alternatives that might seem irrelevant at first glance. In this case, the person is asking ‘how can I do [task] using [tool]?’—in many cases, they’re deviant keywords because these alternative tools do not directly relate to your product or service, and the search suggests that the person is already dead-set on what solution they’re going to rely on (and it’s not yours).

However, we don’t write these keywords off because the person is trying to complete a task in a way that we know is inefficient, full of hassle, and prone to error. This gives us a chance to convince that searcher that they’re better off taking a different route now or in the future.

One of the strongest examples of this approach is our article for Circuit, a software for delivery companies that handles route planning, courier tracking, and much more.

We decided to target the keyword, ‘how to plan the shortest route for multiple destinations in google maps’ even though this was helping someone do something without using Circuit. The idea was that by taking the searcher through the step-by-step process of planning an efficient route for multiple stops in Google Maps, they’ll see that it’s actually a real pain.

This pain then opens up an opportunity for us to make the case for Circuit being a better option.

The bonus is that a significant number of people searching for this are doing so because they’re making deliveries. They don’t say that in their search term, but that’s one of the primary reasons for someone needing to create the shortest route from a list of destinations. This is Circuit’s main audience, and as a result, this post has generated thousands of free trial signups.

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As we’ve written about extensively, including in our foundational Pain Point SEO article, we always prioritize bottom-of-funnel (BoF), high-buying-intent keywords for clients—because we’re more interested in generating conversions from SEO and content than just traffic. To recap, Pain Point SEO utilizes three main content frameworks. The two highest converting frameworks are:

1. Category Keywords

These are keywords that indicate someone is simply looking for your exact product type or category. For Shopify, for example, these would be keywords such as ecommerce software or ecommerce platform, as well as all the variations on those terms, including solution, app, service(s), tool(s), etc.

2. Comparisons and Alternatives

• These are keywords where the searcher is comparing two or more products in your space. For QuickBooks, for example, these would be keywords such as quickbooks vs xero, quicken vs quickbooks, quickbooks vs freshbooks, etc. We might also tap into related searches that don’t contain QuickBooks and insert them into the conversation, for example honeybook vs freshbooks (vs quickbooks).

• If we were working with Asana, we could target keywords such as trello alternative, podio alternative, and monday.com alternative, as well as ‘alternatives’ variations—plus ‘alternative to’ and ‘alternatives to’ keywords. In some cases, people search for ‘competitors’ (e.g. asana competitors has 2k monthly volume).

And slightly ‘up-funnel’ from these two are jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) keywords.

3. Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) Keywords

Jobs-to-be-done keywords are keywords that indicate someone has a problem that your product helps solve. Unlike the two frameworks above, the searcher isn’t explicitly searching for your product or a competitor, but they need to accomplish something. Their query indicates that it’s something your product can help with. The most common type of JTBD keywords are ‘how to’ searches.

For example, going back to the Shopify case, we’d look at keywords such as how to sell products online, how to add a shop to my website, or how to start an ecommerce store. There are several other options beyond these ‘how to’ keywords, too—which I outline in the rest of this post.

As you can see in the graphic above, JTBD keywords are more mid-funnel, so they don’t have the extreme buying intent of the first two frameworks—but they do unlock a much greater number of keywords/topics. Importantly, they’re still likely to drive conversions because people searching for them are indicating a specific pain point that you can solve.

This post deep-dives into how we think about JTBD keywords. I’ll introduce the different types of jobs-to-be-done keywords with several examples to make sure you don’t leave topic ideas on the table. Then, I’ll finish up with a final section about a more niche approach: combining jobs-to-be-done with competitors and alternatives.

What are your jobs-to-be-done keywords?

As we said above, JTBD keywords are search terms that indicate someone is looking to solve a problem or accomplish something that your product or service helps them achieve.

Although these queries don’t mention your product, your product category, or competitors directly—like Pain Point SEO frameworks #1 (category keywords) and #2 (comparisons and alternatives) do—they unlock a large number of keywords that still have buying intent beyond those first two frameworks.

We coined this name ‘JTBD keywords’ based on the famous jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework by economist Theodore Levitt and later popularized by a widely-shared HBS article by Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall.

It’s fairly straightforward to get your head around this concept: You simply need to understand how your product or service helps someone achieve a desired goal. Then, when you’re selecting keywords to target, you think about that goal rather than the product itself. 

(Note: Content marketing advice often recommends not talking about your product too much in blog posts. But we do sell our clients’ products in JTBD blog posts, often heavily. After all, the whole point is that JTBD keywords still have buying intent. What we’re talking about here is that when choosing the keyword, you look for terms that indicate the user has a goal that your product can help achieve. When you’re actually writing the article, you definitely need to sell how your product helps achieve that goal—in detail.)

The most obvious examples of JTBD keywords are ‘how to’ keywords. These exist for products or services serving basically any industry (B2B and B2C), for example:

• How to sell furniture online (est. 1.5k global monthly searches)
• How to do financial projections (est. 250)
• How to integrate technology in the classroom (est. 500)
• How to screen record with sound (est. 6.2k)
• How to start a vending machine business (est 7.2k)
• How to set up a trust (est. 4k)
• How to drill a hole in glass (est. 3.4k)

What’s often overlooked, though, is that you can look into ‘how to’ keywords without the ‘how’ attached—for example, keywords such as manage staff, hire movers, or find therapist.

In many cases, Google will default to the search intent it thinks is most relevant, for example the results page for hire movers is dominated by ‘how to hire’ posts. But there are exceptions. Find therapist, for example, brings up a list of posts and pages that target search terms like ‘find a therapist’ and ‘find therapists’:

JTBD keywords can also be different variations of ‘way(s) to’ keywords:

• Best way to manage multiple projects (est. 200 global monthly searches)
• Ways to conserve energy (est. 4k)
• Best way to file taxes online (est. 700)
• Best way to clean grout (est. 5.9k)
• Natural way to increase testosterone (est. 1.8k)
• Safest way to buy bitcoin (est. 1.8k)
• Best way to learn bookkeeping (est. 50)
• Easy way to clean oven (est. 2.2k)
• Best way to recruit employees (est. 250)

You can also look into ‘can you/I?’ or ‘should you/I?’ keywords. For example:

• Can you do your own taxes (est. 300 global monthly searches)
• Should I lease or buy a car (est. 3.8k)
• Can I manage my own rental property (est. 100)
• Should I install solar panels (est. 250)
• Should I hire an interior designer (est. 250)

People searching for this are trying to get something done, and they’re considering their options.

And finally, these ‘can you/I?’ keywords also link in with branded searches, which we discuss in more detail later in this article. For example:

• Can you use quickbooks for personal finance (est. 150 global monthly searches)
• Can you integrate shopify with squarespace (est. 30)
• Can you add grammarly to outlook (est. 20)
• Can you sync asana with google calendar (est. 20)

We treat these with more skepticism because a higher proportion of these people will already be using the product they’re searching for (hence less potential for conversions, because they’re either already committed to something else or they’re already your customer).

But they’re still worth considering for two reasons: 

• If it’s your brand someone’s searching for, they might be doing their final research about a specific use case before deciding whether or not to buy, and they may just need another nudge to be convinced that it’s the right choice.

• If it’s not your brand they’re searching for, the product they’re using right now might not be able to do what they want. If you’re a competitor, this gives you an opportunity to explain how your product would solve that pain point for them, if they switched. (More on this approach in the second half of this post, which explains how you can combine JTBD with competitors and alternatives).

So, in summary, most of the best JTBD keywords will be:

• ‘How to’ keywords (and variants without the how, such as find therapist)
• ‘Way(s) to’ keywords
• ‘Can you’ or ‘can I’ keywords
• ‘Should you’ or ‘should I’ keywords

How to find JTBD keywords 

Unsurprisingly, we think the best way of getting to these types of keywords is to know what pain points your product or service solves. JTBD keywords are in many ways the heart of Pain Point SEO. You need to get into the weeds on all the different levels of what your product does for people, and also understand the different ways people describe the jobs they need to do.

Sources of that information include:

• Customer enquiries (emails, webforms, social messages)
• Product demo recordings
• Interviews with internal experts at your company
• Customer service emails, calls, and surveys
• Forums, chat rooms, and social media platforms
• SEO software (though imperfect, many will reveal interrelated topics and keywords)

There’s no quick-win here; to get hold of these different keyword angles, you need to have a deep understanding of the problems you fix, the mindset of someone who wants to fix it, and the language they’re using to find that solution online.

Combining JTBD with competitors and alternatives

There’s another level of jobs-to-be-done keywords that you can tap into if you’re ready to start moving up the funnel with your content strategy (i.e. if you’ve already mopped up the highest-buying-intent terms, such as ‘how to’ searches): combining JTBD with competitor and alternatives, including non-direct or ‘low tech’ alternatives.

Before you do this, it’s important to have a firm grasp of who and what your competitors are—both in terms of the product you offer but also in the context of Google’s search results. There are actually many more angles to cover here than it initially seems.

How to Define Your Competitors for SEO Content

Spreadsheets are (often) an underestimated competitor

If you’re working in the software/tech industry, you’ve probably already heard the old adage about Excel being your biggest competitor. We’ve certainly found that to be a pretty common scenario for B2B software. Anecdotally, for example:

• Back in 2021, we started working with the staff leave planning app, Timetastic. Most of their new customers were coming to them because they were fed up with managing time off via emails and spreadsheets—either designed from scratch or using templates. Still, the vast majority of businesses still keep using spreadsheets. Why?
  • They feel like they’re doing just fine with spreadsheets and it’s ‘free’.
  • They’re unaware of the time they’re losing by managing staff leave manually.
  • They’re unaware that there’s an affordable way to do things better, and/or unaware of what ‘better’ actually looks like.
• We’ve also been working with StrataPT—a software platform for physical therapy practices. Most PTs are still using a mixture of manual processes and software, with one of the mainstays being Excel. Practice owners use it for everything from documenting new patients and treatment, to billing and recording the practice’s financial performance.

In fact, you can look at all sorts of software use cases and see how MS Excel or Google Sheets might be one of the most-used alternatives: project management, team workflow planning, documentation, financial reporting, sales prospecting… the list goes on.

So, for many software businesses, spreadsheets are something to position yourself against. 

Defining the rest of your competitors

It’s important to remember: we’re writing articles to rank for conversion-generating keywords. This means we need to work really hard to make sure we’re covering all the bases and finding as many angles as possible to tap into real pain points. That’s why we recommend thinking methodically about who, or what, your competitors are—because this will give you topic ideas.

So here’s my full list of competitor types:

• Direct competitors who do exactly the same as what you do, targeting the same people with similar features or services that alleviate the same pain points. They have roughly similar pricing structures. You probably know most of them already.

• Niche competitors who do the same as what you do, but for a smaller market—either geographically or for a section of your audience. This is relative. For example, if you run an accounting software company, the niche competitor might be software designed for healthcare. And if you run a healthcare accounting software company, the niche competitor might be one designed specifically for dentist offices. And so on.

• Broader competitors. Same as above, but in reverse. If you run that dental accounting software, you might be competing with bigger tools that offer a plugin or template which customizes the experience for dental practices.

• Alternative solutions, including spreadsheets—but also humans. For example, an alternative to StrataPT’s physical therapy billing software is an outsourced team of humans who create and submit claims, then chase insurance firms for payment. While this is undoubtedly less effective than software + humans, it’s still being done and is still an option on the table for physical therapists who need help with their billing. Building an in-house team to do a certain job is also an option that should be seen as competition.

• Search competitors who write about the same stuff, but don’t offer the same product:
  • Similar audiences, different product use cases. You’ll need to be mindful of companies that aren’t direct product competitors but are competing with you in search because they happen to target the same audience.For example, Monday.com has written extensively about remote work because remote teams are an ‘audience’ they’ve identified as using their software. If you have a product specifically geared towards solving remote work pain points—e.g. an app helping remote teams record time—you might not think of Monday.com an actual competitor, but on Google, you’ll end up competing with them and other large companies that also target remote workers. This can make ranking high more difficult than you initially thought (although it’s never impossible—see Underdog SEO on how to approach SEO against large sites).
  • Completely different companies or products that use the same terminology. For example, one client integrates technology in offices and commercial buildings for energy control, access, and air quality. It’s a specialized, high-ticket purchase; yet a bulk of their keyword opportunities are ‘poisoned’ by overlapping B2C terms, e.g. air quality sensors, smart heating system, or automatic door closer.

How to combine JTBD keywords with competitors and alternatives

The best way of showing how we do this is to provide a few real examples:

1. How to add annual leave to Outlook Calendar

Timetastic founder Gary Bury has always told us their biggest competitors are Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. Despite there being loads of HR apps and staff leave planners available, the majority of companies still use spreadsheets.

This meant we were referencing spreadsheets in most of our posts, either as a solution the reader might be considering or as the thing they were already doing.

We also went after terms such as staff leave planner for excel and google sheets annual leave template, which generated more than 40 free trial signups (via organic visitors) across 9 months. These posts gave the reader template options while setting out a robust argument for why a spreadsheet template doesn’t actually cut it.

But we also knew people were using Outlook and other work calendars to manage staff leave (often in combination with spreadsheets), so we wrote a post combining a job-to-be-done with an alternative to Timetastic: Microsoft Outlook.

It might seem like a weird keyword to go after, since at first glance, Timetastic doesn’t help at all with this problem. The link we saw was that:

• The process of adding annual leave to Outlook is a pain for anyone. It’s surprisingly convoluted. So we knew that this was someone who’d be primed for a better solution.

• Timetastic can integrate with their users calendars, including Outlook Calendar. This means users could manage annual leave in the Timetastic app and everything would be automatically reflected in their work calendar.

Within that post, we explained the step-by-step process of adding staff leave to Outlook. But we also made sure we highlighted that there was a much easier workaround for the long-term. That easier workaround is Timetastic, and we made that argument openly, without being coy. This post generated 20 free trial signups in the first 6 months after publication.

2. How to Plan the Shortest Route for Multiple Destinations in Google Maps

Probably one of our biggest successes was our post “How to Plan the Shortest Route for Multiple Destinations in Google Maps”, which has generated thousands of free trial signups for Circuit’s route planning software since it was published back in 2020.

Note: We wrote a full case study on our work with Circuit, which you can find here: Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 Sessions in 6 months: Circuit Case Study

The angle here is similar to our other example:

• It’s possible, but not ideal, to find the shortest route for multiple destinations on Google Maps—it’s doable, but fiddly. Plus, there are limitations (e.g. maximum 10 stops at once) that Circuit doesn’t have. For people who want to figure out the best route around more than 10 stops, Google Maps isn’t really the best solution.

• A significant proportion of people searching this keyword are doing so to better manage their delivery routes, or they’re visiting multiple customers or business contacts in a single day and want to know the most efficient route. That is Circuit’s audience.

• Circuit integrates with Google Maps, meaning the person can still use Google Maps for their navigation with the help of Circuit behind the scenes to optimize the whole route.

In both of these examples, there’s one common theme:

‘You can do it. Here’s how. But it’s not ideal, and here’s why. We have a better option for you.’ 

We’re genuinely helping them do the job they need to do with whatever tool they have, while showing them how they could have a much easier life by doing it differently next time.

Theoretical ideas for JTBD + competitors/alternative keywords

Just as some food for thought, here are a few theoretical JTBD + competitor/alternative topics for some real-world companies:

• Shopify can pick up on the weaknesses of other eCommerce platforms and go after those with helpful ‘how to’ posts that also make the argument for switching, such as: how to customize woocommerce shop page or how to edit a woocommerce checkout page—give the reader the answer clearly and honestly, but highlight how much easier, faster, or cheaper this is to do on Shopify. If they’re suffering from the hassle of WooCommerce, they may be ripe for a switch to another platform.

• Slack can target keywords that indicate someone’s pain points around email. For example:  best way to manage email, how to organize your email, or how to manage your inbox—Slack has historically positioned itself against business email, and they’ve even created comparison pages to list the pros and cons of Slack vs email. Someone searching for ways to manage or organize their email is clearly experiencing downsides, and may be open to doing things differently. So, Slack could target these keywords to offer advice on useful ways to manage/organize their email, while pointing to a better solution for internal communication—Slack.

• QuickBooks, Freshbooks, or Xero will know that people are managing their business finances using a mix of free online alternatives. So they might want to go after keywords such as: how to make invoices on word, how to do invoices on excel, or how to make a budgeting spreadsheet. Again, this will give them the space they need to make a robust argument for why their product makes these jobs much easier to do.

• SimpliSafe might see a bulk of their new business customers switching from 24/7 onsite security to a technology-assisted approach (I actually have no clue whether this is true or not, but it’s just to illustrate my point). With this in mind, they could do a teardown of the traditional approach by targeting keywords like hiring security or how to hire a security guard. Pros, cons, ways to recruit… plus the ‘modern’ alternative: SimpliSafe.

• As a content/SEO agency, we at Grow and Convert have a pretty strong argument for why working with us makes more financial sense than building an in-house writing team or hiring a load of freelancers. The goal for our clients is to get more customers through their website, but they’re searching for all sorts of ways to get that job done: how to hire freelance writers, how to build a content team, and how to write seo content—as well as alternatives to content and SEO (e.g. how to get more customers via social media).
  
  In the future, we might look to target some of these keywords with guidance on best practices (e.g. for hiring writers), while making the argument that the reader could avoid the hassle, costs, and risks of substandard results (i.e. poor ROI) by working with us instead.

When writing JTBD posts, it’s important that you properly and honestly serve the search intent. Start by giving the reader the information they need to do the job. Then, make an up-front argument for why they might want to try a different solution in the future.

JTBD keywords are the key to unlocking the potential of Pain Point SEO in your content strategy. Once you’re done targeting category and competitor keywords, JTBD keywords will open up years of content ideas with high buying intent, so you can keep doing content marketing and SEO that generates leads and sales.

Over the past few years, we’ve published various posts that explain how we prioritize content topics and target keywords based on conversion intent, not search volume, including:

• Our guide to pain point SEO, which explains our approach to coming up with topics that drive leads and signups.
• Our guide to SaaS content marketing and our case study about expanding from bottom-of-funnel content to top-of-funnel, which both talk about the importance of targeting bottom-of-funnel keywords with blog posts.

In all these articles, we share data showing how posts targeting high-conversion intent, bottom-of-funnel (BoF) topics have a really high conversion rate. And we show how they tend to outperform top-of-funnel (ToF) posts for conversions, despite getting less traffic.

As a result, targeting BoF keywords has become the foundation of our content strategy for clients and our differentiation as a content agency.

But despite this data and our reasoning, we still get client pushback on proposed target keywords because SEO tools say the number of searches is low. Clients say they get that these BoF keywords may have higher conversion rates, but they’re worried that a high conversion rate is useless if only a few people are searching for it in the first place.

So this got me thinking: Is there a way we can clearly demonstrate the value of low-volume keywords so we can open up new topic angles for our clients?

The answer lies in the number of conversions they generate. I did this research and it revealed some pretty interesting data, which we’ll share in this post.

Key Takeaways: Why Are They Outperforming Estimates?

There was one overarching takeaway from our analysis: mini-volume keywords consistently generate way more traffic and conversions than back-of-the-envelope estimates predict. For example, people often calculate the value of keywords this way:

• This keyword gets 20 searches a month (estimate from SEO software).
• Best case scenario, we’ll rank #1. This gets around 30% of clicks, so that’s only around 7 clicks a month.
• Even if we get a 2% conversion rate from traffic to lead, that’s 0.14 leads a month.

Conclusion: not worth it!

This logic seems sound but in practice we’ve noticed that this conclusion (“not worth it”) is wrong. As we’ll show with multiple examples below, ranking in the top few spots for keywords with 20 estimated searches or less are generating multiple conversions per month—often way more than the ToF posts with high traffic generate.

This is because of two reasons:

1. Monthly search estimates consistently underestimate the amount of traffic a keyword will generate if you rank highly for it. Often by a lot.
2. If you follow our Pain Point SEO process, you should only be going after mini-volume keywords that have really high conversion intent. Those will convert a lot higher than more typical top-of-funnel posts.

Big picture: Taking a snapshot across 2 years and 17 of our clients, articles targeting sub-20 search volume generated more than 1,600 conversions for our clients (leads, signups, demos, etc. directly attributed to our content). But it’s hard to grasp what this means without digging into the strategy and examples, which we’ll do below.

What are Mini-Volume Keywords?

Mini-Volume keywords are defined as any keyword with less than 20 estimated searches per month. For the purposes of the post, the data is taken from the SEO tool Ahrefs. However, the same principles apply even if you use a different tool to get estimated volumes.

Mini-Volume Keywords in Action: Real Client Data

1. Circuit: Competitor Comparisons and How-to Guides

Circuit offers an app for independent delivery drivers and software for midsize delivery teams. We published a full case study about our work with them over here: Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 Sessions in 6 months.

As well as big-hitting posts that drive most of Circuit’s blog conversions, we targeted a range of lower-volume keywords that have also generated a load of free trial signups.

For example:

• 6 competitor comparison articles, all with less than 20 searches per month. We pitch Circuit against competitors like Routific, Route4Me, and RouteXL.In the 2 years between our starting date and the month this post got written, these 6 articles have collectively driven 149 organic signups. The average conversion rate for these posts is 2%. Alone, Route4Me Alternative converts at 4.5%.

• Niche how-to articles on starting a delivery service. For example, starting a medical delivery service, which had sub-20 volume when we decided to go after it. In the 9 months following its publication, this single post drove 31 free trial signups. It only started ranking on page 1 in month 3, so that’s 31 signups in 6 months—or 5 signups a month from a keyword that supposedly only gets 20 searches per month. (One big benefit of going after low-volume keywords is that you can get in early before competitors realize search volume is growing. In this case, lots of keyword variations of “medical delivery service” popped up over following months, and growth for our exact-match target keyword sped up too.)

• Use cases that are a perfect description of Circuit’s functionality, including how to create a delivery route, which drove 12 free trial signups in the 4 months following its publication on the blog.

Circuit is a self-serve B2B SaaS product, and they typically have teams with 10-15 drivers using their Circuit for Teams service. A “conversion” is a free trial start. Taking into account the free trial to paid conversion rate, we’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars worth of MRR that’s generated for Circuit by mini-volume keywords.

2. Geekbot: Getting in Early on Growing-Popularity Keywords

My colleague Daniel Levi has written an in-depth case study on Geekbot, where he explains how (and why) we started with BoF content and transitioned to ToF after two years of working together.

Daniel found that BoF posts converted 25X more than ToF posts.

And most interestingly, the number of conversions was vastly higher on BoF posts, despite those articles receiving 7X less traffic than ToF ones.

Bottom-of-funnel content drove 1,348 conversions from 28,000 organic traffic, while top-of-funnel content generated only 397 from 200,000 organic traffic.  

But what does this have to do with mini-volume keywords?

Looking at some of Daniel’s BoF (in other words: high conversion intent) articles, we see a number of keywords that have sub-20 search volume:

• Our article targeting “free Slack standup bot” (20 vol) has generated 177 organic conversions since being published in December 2021, 7 months ago—that’s over 25 conversions per month generated from a keyword that according to SEO tools, like Ahrefs, only gets 20 searches a month.

• Our article targeting “daily standup app” (10 vol) collected a load of rankings for different keyword variations that have low-to-mid search volume—e.g. “daily standup tools” (30 vol) and “standup software” (40 vol). This one has generated 37 signups since being published—also back in December 2021.

• Our article targeting “alternatives to standup meetings” (10 vol) is a bit higher up the funnel than “bot” and “app” terms, which are both pretty descriptive of the Geekbot product itself. But this one actually converts pretty well. 20 organic signups and 30 via Google Ads since March 2020.

Important: Anecdotally, when we look at other bottom-of-funnel keywords that were sub-20 when we targeted them, we see they’re now registering a larger search volume on Ahrefs. For example, “best slack poll app” is now showing 40 monthly searches. The article targeting this keyword has since generated more than 300 signups for Geekbot.

What’s happened here is that Geekbot is in a new niche—one that took off as the Coronavirus lockdowns accelerated remote working.

So our content was in the right place at the right time.

As I detail below, this is one of multiple reasons why articles that rank for mini-volume keywords almost always get more pageviews per month than the monthly search volume estimate.

3 More Quickfire Examples from Our Clients

While we’re not including our whole client base in this study, we can confirm it’s safe to say we definitely see the benefits of targeting mini-volume keywords—pretty much for all the clients we work with right now.

Here are a few more examples to drive this point home:

1. With one B2B SaaS company, we saw that “for small businesses” qualifier on a “software” keyword had different articles on page 1 than the software keyword by itself. (As we explain in this post on content writing, analyzing what’s ranking is a key part of our process. Unique page 1 results between two keywords suggests different search intent.)

Ahrefs was showing 0-10 volume for this, but we went ahead and wrote a piece that now has a 6% conversion rate and went into first-place position on Google in a couple of days.

Note: Another benefit of targeting mini-volume keywords is that they’re quicker and easier to rank for. I’ll go into this in more detail in the next section.

2. For a marketing agency, we targeted a B2B SaaS keyword that was showing 0-10 monthly volume. Since being published in September 2021, that post has driven 7 organic inquiries and 2 paid (Google Ads) inquiries. With contract sizes in the tens of thousands of dollars, that’s well worth the investment.

3. For one company that offers software for digital asset management, we wrote a competitor comparison post targeting an “alternatives” keyword that has no more than 20 searches per month. This one has generated 11 signups so far. It’s a non-self-serve enterprise SaaS with a high price point. Similarly to the marketing agency we mention above, these 11 conversions are worth a lot.

Note: This “alternatives” angle also works for B2C companies—we targeted the competitor of a company that sells excessive sweating treatment products. Again, this keyword was only showing 10 monthly searches when we went after it. Over a 12-month period, this post generated 15 monthly subscriptions to their treatment.

You’ll see in examples 2 and 3 above that a high price point means mini-volume keywords are really important. You might get a meager 20 visitors to a post annually, but if that post is high-intent BoF, this can translate into a healthy return on investment.

Regardless of the monetary value of what you sell—if you’re ignoring mini-volume keywords, you’re leaving signups, demos, or inquiries on the table.

How Long Do Mini-Volume Keyword Posts Take to Rank? (Sometimes Just a Few Days)

We recently published a post about how long it takes to rank on the first page of Google. The answer from looking at our client examples: usually around 5 months for the first pieces, but it picks up pretty quickly after that because you build topical authority.

One reason why mini-volume keywords make sense to target is because your competitors ignore them. That means competition in the SERPs is generally lower, so you have a better chance to rank high. And you can do it pretty quickly, too.

To show this, I’ve gone through the historic ranking positions in Ahrefs and compared how long some of Circuit’s mini-volume articles take to rank.

What I found was pretty interesting.

Here’s a few of Circuit’s mini-volume competitor comparison articles:

• Route4Me Alternative: Position 2 within 7 days
• Postmates vs Onfleet: Position 1 within 4 days
• RoadWarrior Alternative: Position 4 within 30 days (now position 2)
• RoadWarrior vs Circuit: Position 1 within 3 days

Remember: Collectively, these types of posts have driven 149 free trial signups over the past 2 years. One of them has a 4.5% conversion rate. And they all took less than 30 days to rank in the top 5 positions—many of them actually in first or second place.

This is a no-brainer, really: Articles that rank fast and start converting immediately.

There are plenty of other mini-volume posts that beat the 5 month average and get well-placed within 1-2 months. That’s still good. In contrast, both our articles targeting keywords with more than 1,000 monthly organic took 3-5 months to get to the top-3. Not bad, but definitely slower—and we see a similar pattern across various clients.

There’s a logical correlation here: Small traffic volume is less appealing to marketers, and therefore there’s less competition. This gives you a better chance to get in on the action.

The irony here is that these BoF mini-volume keywords potentially have more value as conversion-drivers than the large-volume ToF ones—as shown by Daniel in his Geekbot case study (397 ToF conversions vs 1,348 BoF from 7X less traffic).

They should arguably be everyone’s priority. But they’re not.

Mini-Volume Keywords Often Get More Volume Than Their Monthly Search Estimates

As we saw in one of the examples above (“free slack standup bot”), articles that rank in the top few spots for a mini-volume keyword almost always end up getting a lot more pageviews per month than the estimated monthly searches for that keyword.

Here’s a detailed example from our own site: “landing page vs blog post”

We published that post targeting that exact keyword on February 18th, 2022, roughly 4 months before writing this.

That keyword, according to Ahrefs, only gets 10 searches a month:

We’re ranking in the middle of page 1 for it today—between #5 and #4.

Now to be fair, the idea that search volume in SEO tools such as Ahrefs is an underestimate is not new. Ahrefs themselves have this great video lesson in their course that says this precisely (definitely worth watching):

Their main point of why keyword volume underestimates organic traffic potential is that if you rank for one keyword, you’ll also rank for a bunch of other related keywords. They rightly suggest you check in Ahrefs for what else a given page is ranking for to see true traffic potential.

Ahrefs even has a “volume” column to factor this into an estimated organic traffic number for each page ranking for a given keyword. And indeed Ahrefs does estimate our page has a traffic volume of 350, because it also ranks for 63 other keywords:

But, when I check what those 63 other keywords are, none of them are rankings on page 1, where basically all traffic comes from:

It’s hard to believe that these page 2, 3, 4+  rankings are generating much traffic to our post—even if there are 63 of them. In fact, even Google Search Console doesn’t show this post ranking for any queries that are giving us clicks in the last 3 months:

And yet, that page is getting more than 100 sessions a month just from organic traffic.

In May alone, it was the landing page of 138 organic sessions. June is on track to hit 130+ organic sessions again. Remember: this is ranking #4 for a keyword that supposedly gets just 10 searches per month, not ranking on page 1 for any other keyword and is generating 130 organic sessions per month.

To further highlight how unintuitive that is, this is what percent of clicks you can expect by position on page 1 for a keyword:

(This is from Backlinko, although many others have similar data.)

Position 4 or 5 should get around 10% of clicks. So in theory, ranking 4 or 5 for a 10 searches per month keyword should give you, on average, one click a month. Again, we’re getting 130 sessions a month to this post just from organic.

We can’t emphasize this conclusion enough: If you rank for a given keyword with a given monthly search volume, you will get more organic traffic than the stated search volume for that keyword. And when this keyword is a BoF keyword, this traffic will result in conversions—perhaps a healthy amount of conversions, too.

We’ve seen this over and over again. But why? We think there are a few reasons:

1. The data we get from SEO tools is rarely up-to-date. Search trends happen fast. For example, Covid-19 searches exploded during spring-summer 2020, but the SEO tools didn’t show this info for a few months afterwards.

2. SEO software isn’t the one-and-only authority. The search volumes you see will differ between different tools, and fluctuate over time as they update their data. What you see often isn’t accurate. So it’s better to focus on pain points and look at keyword variations and volumes afterwards. Take them with a pinch of salt.

(This isn’t a critique of SEO tools—they say themselves that traffic volumes are estimates, and recommend you don’t base your whole content strategy on them.)

3. Keyword variations combined add up to healthier volume than is immediately obvious. So if our main target keyword has an estimated 20 searches per month but there are 10 variations that our piece could rank in top positions for, each of those might add 5-10 searches per month and boost the overall number of visitors.You may also rank for lots of extremely long tail low-volume searches that simply aren’t in the database of the SEO tool you’re using (which may be happening with the landing page vs. blog post article above).

4. Mini-volume doesn’t always stay that way. If you’re working on something that’s on the up (e.g. Slack standup tools), you might find yourself with a heavy-hitting keyword in a year or so—and you’ve had the jump on your search competitors.

Get help with your content marketing

• Questions/Comments? If you have any questions or comments about what we’ve discussed in this post, please let us know in the comments section below.

• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback.

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