Most keyword research advice is tailored for e-commerce. Find the highest-volume terms you can realistically rank for, build content around them, and let conversion rates do the rest. Run enough traffic at a page and some percentage will buy.
That model falls apart in B2B. Your addressable market might be 400 businesses in Australia. A keyword with 20 monthly searches could represent a meaningful share of the buyers you actually want. Volume tells you almost nothing useful on its own.
Here's how to approach B2B keyword research when you're selling to businesses, not consumers.
Volume is the wrong filter for B2B keyword research
How much search volume is good for B2B? Less than you might think.
The most common mistake B2B marketers make with keyword research is filtering out anything below 100 (or 50, or 200) monthly searches. It sounds like a reasonable efficiency filter. In practice, it removes the most commercially relevant terms from your list.
A search for "business it support team" might show 10 monthly searches in an SEO tool. But those 10 monthly searches could include an operations manager whose internal IT resource just left, a CFO evaluating whether to outsource their IT function entirely, or a business owner who's grown past what their current setup can handle. One converted client from that keyword could be worth $25,000 or more in annual contract value.
Compare that to "marketing strategy", which currently pulls 590 monthly searches in Australia. The vast majority of the users behind those searches will never buy anything from a B2B business.
In B2B, a smaller volume of relevant searches will almost always outperform a larger volume of irrelevant ones.
B2B buyers search in three distinct modes
B2B buying cycles are long - averaging around 11 months based on recent research. This process often involves multiple search sessions, and the language changes at each stage.
Early in the process, buyers search around the problem, before they've settled on a solution. "How to reduce equipment downtime." "B2B website not generating leads." "When to outsource marketing." These searches don't convert immediately, but showing up here builds the familiarity that influences the eventual shortlist.
Mid-process, buyers search for solutions. "Industrial concrete sealing contractors Queensland." "HubSpot implementation consultant." "B2B SEO audit." Higher intent, closer to a conversation.
Late-stage, they validate. They search the supplier's name, look for case studies in their industry, or seek out comparisons between shortlisted options. A lot of this activity is invisible to keyword tools because it's branded or highly specific, but it's where final decisions get made.
A keyword strategy that only targets the middle stage misses the early phase where opinions form and shortlists are built. Those informational queries are often the least contested and the most useful for building authority in your space.
Your buyers don't search using your language
Every industry has two vocabularies: the internal one and the buyer one.
Internally, you might call it "predictive maintenance scheduling software". Your buyer searches "reduce machine downtime" or "equipment failure prevention". Your business calls it "B2B demand generation". Your buyer searches "how to get more leads from our website".
If you build a keyword list from your own service descriptions and product names, you're targeting the language of people who already know you exist. The keywords worth targeting are the ones your buyers use before they've found you.
The most reliable way to find the gap: talk to recent clients about how they described the problem before they knew your solution existed. The words they use in that conversation are almost always better keyword candidates than anything you'd find by staring at your own website.
Many B2B businesses undervalue geographic keywords
B2B services are usually location-dependent. A company looking for an industrial painting contractor or a HubSpot consultant likely isn't casting a global net. Location is how they narrow the field.
Service + location keywords are typically lower competition than broad terms and convert better because they've already filtered by geography. 'B2B marketing consultant Brisbane' is easier to rank for than 'B2B marketing consultant', and the person searching is far more likely to become a client.
Geographic anchoring matters in content too. Google's own SEO guidance backs the use of location signals to help establish relevance for local queries. A post about construction software that mentions Queensland, Brisbane, and Australian context will rank differently to one that's geographically generic. Use it naturally, not stuffed into every sentence
Start with buyer language, fill gaps with competitor research
Running a competitor keyword gap analysis is a useful sanity check. It surfaces terms your competitors rank for that you don't, which is a reasonable way to find things you've missed.
The limitation: you're building from what others have already targeted. In B2B, especially in niche sectors, some of the best keywords are the ones nobody is targeting yet. The informational queries your buyers ask early in the research process, the "how do I know if I have a problem" questions that come before any product search, are often completely uncontested.
Use competitor analysis to fill gaps and validate your list. Build the list itself from buyer language, mapped to the three buying stages above.
How to build a B2B keyword list
Start without tools. Write down every service you offer and every problem it solves, in plain language. Then list the industries and geographies you work in. This gives you a framework before any tool introduces volume bias.
Run each combination through a keyword tool. Don't filter by volume first. Filter by relevance: would a real buyer in your market type this? If yes, keep it regardless of the number next to it.
Group what you find by buying stage: awareness (problem-focused searches), consideration (solution-focused), decision (supplier or comparison searches). Each group needs different content and a different CTA.
Check Google's "People also ask" and "related searches" for your core terms. These surfaces reflect actual search behaviour and consistently surface useful variations that keyword tools miss or undercount.
For each keyword you keep, map it to a specific page: an existing service page, a blog post, or a gap you need to fill. One page, one primary keyword, a handful of natural variations. Every page should have a job.
Prioritise by commercial relevance, not volume. A 20-search keyword that perfectly matches what a ready buyer would type is worth more to your pipeline than a 500-search keyword that attracts browsers with no purchase intent.
If you want a clear view of what your site currently ranks for, what you're missing, and where to start, a B2B SEO audit maps all of that out and gives you a prioritised list of what to target next.
Want help with working out which keywords your site should be targeting? Get in touch and we can work through it .
