Founder & Chief Executive Officer
I was delivering a keynote at a business conference and I asked the audience a simple question. Have you ever searched for the type of service you offer in your own city or county, just to see whether your business comes up?
I could not believe how few hands went up.
It takes thirty seconds and it tells you exactly where you stand with the people who are out there right now looking for what you do. So before anything else in this post, go do it. Open a search, type your service and your city, and look at what actually appears.
Then let me explain what to do about whatever you find, because showing up takes considerably more than one keyword now.
Type your service plus your city into Google. An accountant in Mississauga types accountant Mississauga. A plumber in Austin types plumber Austin. Then look honestly at what comes back.
Check several things while you are there. Whether you appear at all in the first page of results. Whether your Google Business Profile shows up in the map section. Whether an AI answer appears at the top, and whether anybody is cited inside it. Then search a few variations, since a person with a problem rarely types the clean industry term you would use. They type what they are worried about.
If you did not appear, that is useful information rather than a verdict. It means the work has not been done yet, and it is almost always fixable. What makes it dangerous is not knowing, because you cannot address a gap you have never looked at.
Summary Search your service plus your city, then check whether you appear in results, in the map section, and inside any AI answer. Try variations, since people search their problem rather than the clean industry term.
Here is why targeting a single obvious term stopped working, and the numbers make it stark.
Ahrefs found that 94.74% of keywords get ten monthly searches or fewer. Almost all search volume lives in an enormous spread of specific, lower-volume phrases rather than in a handful of big obvious ones. Google has also said that around 15% of searches it receives have never been searched before, which means a meaningful share of what people type is genuinely new every single day.
So if you are an accountant with one page built around the word bookkeeping, you are competing for a tiny slice of a much larger picture while leaving the rest untouched. The businesses getting found are the ones covering the whole spread of ways people describe the same need.
Summary Ahrefs found 94.74% of keywords get ten monthly searches or fewer, and Google reports around 15% of searches have never been seen before. Search volume lives in a wide spread of specific phrases rather than a few obvious terms.
Take the accountant, since it makes this concrete.
Writing the word bookkeeping is where it starts. Covering the topic properly means writing about affordable bookkeeping services, because price is what a lot of people are actually weighing. It means a piece on doing your own bookkeeping compared with hiring someone, including the honest risks on both sides, since that is a decision people genuinely agonise over. It means explaining the different types of bookkeeping services that exist, because many people do not know what they are choosing between. It means covering what you actually need to keep track of, with proper checklists, because that is the practical question underneath all of it.
Each of those is a separate piece of content answering a separate question that a real person has at a specific moment in their thinking. Together they do something no single page does, which is establish that you cover this subject thoroughly. That accumulated depth is what search engines read as authority on a topic, and it means you show up for the enormous range of ways somebody might phrase their version of the problem.
Summary Covering bookkeeping properly means separate pieces on affordable services, doing it yourself versus hiring out, the types of services available, and what to track. Each answers a different question at a different moment.
This matters more than ever now that AI sits on top of search.
AI tools are reading your site to work out what you genuinely know and whether you are worth citing when somebody asks a question. The more genuinely helpful answers you have published, the more material there is for them to find, understand, and pull from. A site with one thin page about bookkeeping gives them almost nothing to work with. A site covering the subject from twelve angles, in plain language, with real specifics, gives them a great deal.
AI optimization for websites is largely about making that depth readable and citable, which means clear structure, direct answers to actual questions, and content that resolves something rather than circling it. It also rewards first-hand experience heavily, which is why writing from the situations you have personally handled outperforms generic coverage of the same topic. A good SEO company can structure and position this material properly, and the raw knowledge of what your clients actually ask has to come from you.
Summary AI tools read your site to determine what you know and whether to cite you. A thin page gives them nothing while thorough coverage from many angles gives them a great deal, especially when written from first-hand experience.
The practical question is how you generate twelve pieces about a subject you have always summarised in one sentence.
They come from the questions you already get asked. Every objection, confusion, and worry a client has raised is an angle, and they are usually phrased in exactly the language other people type into search. Keeping a running record of those questions turns into a content plan without you having to invent anything, since you have already answered all of it verbally many times over.
Then work through the decision your buyer is actually making. What they wonder before they know your service exists. What they compare you against. What they worry about regarding cost. What they need to prepare. What goes wrong when people get it wrong. Each of those is a piece, and together they cover the full path somebody walks before hiring you.
All of it belongs on your website, since that is the asset that accumulates. Strong website design organised around those questions rather than around your service list meets people at the point they are actually at, and a capable web developer makes sure the site handles the growing library without getting slow or disorganised.
Summary The angles come from questions clients already ask you, phrased in the language people search, plus the full decision path your buyer walks. All of it belongs on your website, organised around questions rather than your service list.
Go and search for your own service in your own city. It costs you half a minute and it tells you where you genuinely stand.
If you are not showing up, the fix is depth. One keyword covers almost nothing when nearly 95% of keywords get fewer than ten searches a month and new phrasings appear constantly. Cover your subject from every angle a real person might approach it from, answer the questions they actually have, and keep publishing.
The more helpful information you give the robots to read, the more likely they are to cite you. That is the whole game now.
Sources:
Ahrefs, SEO Statistics (94.74% of keywords get ten monthly searches or fewer; 0.0008% of keywords get more than 100,000 monthly searches).
https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-statistics/
Google, cited via Ahrefs (approximately 15% of all Google searches have never been searched before).
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-search-statistics/
Get a website, SEO, and email strategy that you actually control. Book a free consultation or keep reading.
