A bottom-of-funnel keyword is a search typed by someone who has finished researching and is choosing a supplier: a service plus a place, a product plus a price, a brand versus another brand, near me, cost, quote, book. They are a small fraction of all searches and most of the revenue. For a small business they are the right place to start.
The funnel, briefly
Top of funnel is learning: what is a load balancer. Middle is comparing: best load balancer for small business. Bottom is buying: load balancer pricing, book a fireworks display, emergency plumber Reading. The further down, the fewer the searches and the higher the value of each.
How to spot one
Look at what Google shows. If the results are product pages, service pages, price lists and maps, the query is transactional and Google knows it. If the results are guides and explainers, it is not, and a sales page will struggle to rank for it however good it is. Search intent is decided by the searcher and revealed by the results page.
Modifiers are the other tell: price, cost, quote, hire, buy, near me, in a town name, for a specific occasion, a brand name plus review or alternative.
Why start here
Because it pays fastest. A page that ranks for a phrase with fifty searches a month, thirty of them from people ready to buy, changes a small business. A blog post that ranks for a phrase with five thousand curious searchers rarely does. Build the pages that sell, get them indexed and linked, and only then spend on the educational content that feeds them.
Those pages also tend to face weaker competition than the numbers suggest, because most content strategies chase volume.
What the page needs
The thing being sold, its price or a clear route to one, evidence that you are real and local and trusted, and a way to act. Specific beats comprehensive. If the reader has to scroll past three paragraphs of history to find the price, they will go back to the results and try the next one.
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Long-tail keyword
A long-tail keyword is a specific search phrase with a small number of searches a month, as opposed to a broad head term with many. Fireworks is a head term; quiet fireworks for a wedding in October is long tail. Long-tail phrases are less contested, so a small site can rank for them, and they are usually typed by someone closer to buying.
Branded search
A branded search is a query that includes your business or product name, such as your company name plus reviews, opening hours or a product. Non-branded searches are everything else. Branded traffic measures whether people already know you; non-branded traffic measures whether search is finding you new customers. Reporting them together hides both answers.
KD
Keyword difficulty is a score, usually from zero to a hundred, that an SEO tool assigns to a search phrase to estimate how hard it would be to rank on the first page. It is calculated mainly from the link strength of the pages already ranking. It is not a Google metric, every tool computes it differently, and it is a rough guide rather than a verdict.
CTR
Click-through rate is the share of people who saw your result and clicked it: clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage in Search Console. It falls steeply with position, so it only means anything when compared against the position it was earned at. Whether Google uses clicks to rank is a question with two honest halves, covered below.