Search angle:how people search when they need you

I want to put a name on something I have been doing for years without calling it anything. I am going to call it the search angle, and this article is where I define it, because I have not found the idea written down anywhere as one thing, and I think it deserves to be.

Here is the short version. Keyword research tells you what people type, how often they type it, and how hard it is to rank for it. That is what Chapter 3 of the book is about, and it is the foundation of everything. But keyword research does not tell you what people are looking for at the moment they need what you sell. Very often that is not your service. It is a cheaper service, an adjacent service, or a problem they do not yet know is your problem. The search angle is that moment, and the businesses that find theirs stop competing for the obvious keyword and start winning the customer before anyone else is in the room.

Why this is not keyword research, and not long tail either

The concept is not new. People have been doing this on instinct for as long as there have been directories. What is new is naming it and separating it from the two things it gets confused with.

It is not keyword research. Keyword research is a measurement: volume, intent, difficulty. The search angle is a decision that uses those measurements. You still need the research; it is one of the instruments. But the research by itself will happily tell you that "AC installation Phoenix" has great volume and brutal difficulty, and leave you there. The angle is the question you ask next: who searches for what, right before they need an installation, and can I win that search instead?

It is not long-tail keywords or low-hanging fruit. Those are easier phrases for the same service. "Affordable AC installation north Phoenix" is a long-tail version of the installation keyword. A search angle can be a completely different service that shares the customer. The distinction matters because the long-tail approach keeps you inside your own category, and the angle lets you leave it. One is a tactic for finding softer phrases. The other is a business decision about where the customer relationship starts.

The search angle is wider than both. It is customer research expressed through search: what people are trying to fix, in what order, with what words, and which of those moments a business of your size can realistically own.

Example one: selling HVAC through pest control

At my previous agency we had a client in the Phoenix area who sold HVAC services. He was a difficult client and a very smart one. Phoenix HVAC is one of the most competitive local markets in the United States: a few very large companies dominate both the organic results and the auctions, and a mid-sized operator attacking "AC repair Phoenix" head-on is paying a fortune for scraps.

He was also licensed for pest control. So that is what he advertised. The cost per click was a fraction of HVAC, the organic difficulty was a fraction of HVAC, and instead of three or four impossible keywords he had dozens of winnable ones: scorpion control, termite inspection, bed bug treatment, each with its own neighbourhoods and its own pages. A pest control visit gets a technician into the house, and he trained those technicians to earn trust while they were there. By the time the air conditioner started acting up, the homeowner already had a company they liked in their phone. The pest control was real and it was profitable, but it was also the angle. It was the search he could win on the way to the sale he wanted.

Example two: the angle every HVAC company already has

The first example depends on having a second licence. This one applies to every HVAC company in the world, and most of them get it backwards.

The highest-ticket service in HVAC is installation. So that is the keyword everyone fights for, and it is the one almost nobody wins. But think about how a new system actually gets bought. Occasionally someone builds a house and orders one. Far more often, a system breaks down in July, the owner searches for a repair, a technician shows up, and over the next hour the owner learns that the compressor is gone, the unit is fifteen years old, and a repair would be money thrown at a corpse. The installation was sold during a repair call.

The search angle for installations is repair. Repair searches are more frequent, more urgent, more local and less contested. A repair earns a few hundred dollars. It also earns a customer who now trusts you, in a house with an ageing unit, and the technician standing in the hallway is the most persuasive salesperson the company will ever have. Rank for the repair, train for the upsell, and the installations follow. Rank for the installation and you are paying to argue with people who already have three quotes.

Example three: the chatbot that sells a marketing agency

The third example is a marketing agency I do white-label SEO for. The owner is an old friend, and when we sat down to build the search strategy I found that the most interesting part of her business was something she had worked out on her own, in paid social rather than search.

The agency offers a white-label CRM. What it advertises is a chatbot: a small, concrete tool that small businesses understand immediately and search for on their own. People arrive because they want to organise their customer conversations. Once they are in, it becomes obvious that the chatbot is the least of their problems: the brand is inconsistent, the social media is abandoned, the ads are pointed at the wrong people. She started filling those gaps one by one, branding, social management, social ads, and the chatbot became the door through which an agency sells its whole catalogue. When we built the SEO strategy we did the same thing on purpose: we picked the entry search people actually make and let the rest of the services be sold in person. I will not publish the specifics, because the specifics are hers, but the shape of it is exactly the same as the Phoenix examples. Win the search that is available. Sell the service that is valuable.

How to find your search angle

Start from the sale you want, not from the keyword that names it. Then work backwards through the customer's life until you reach a moment you can win.

Ask what happens right before someone needs your main service. Not in your language, in theirs. Something breaks, something is due, something embarrassing happens, a smaller problem appears that they would rather fix today. Each of those moments produces a search, and each of those searches has its own volume, its own difficulty and its own competitors, which is where the keyword research comes back in, now with a purpose. Ask which of those moments gets a person into a conversation with you, on the phone, at the door, in a chat. Ask what you would need to offer to be a credible answer to that search, even if it means adding a service, a licence or a product that is not your core business. And ask whether the people who will deliver that first service know that their real job is to earn the second one.

Then rank for the angle. Build the pages, run the ads, write the profiles around the entry search, and measure the business by what happens after it: repeat customers, upsells, the share of high-ticket work that came through the cheaper door. The angle is only an angle if the second sale actually happens.

Why I am bothering to name it

Because unnamed ideas get done by accident. Every example above was discovered by a smart operator who noticed something working and leaned into it. None of them set out to find a search angle, because the phrase did not exist. I think it should, so that it can be looked for on purpose, taught to a new client in one sentence, and put on the agenda of the first strategy meeting, right after the keyword research and before anyone decides which impossible keyword to spend a year on.

This is also the kind of idea this blog exists for: things I have learned since the book, or things the book touches that I wanted to expand. If you want the foundations the search angle sits on top of, Chapter 1 is about never building a strategy from assumptions, and Chapter 3 is about how to measure what people actually search. The search angle is what you do with both.

About the author

Alejandro Muñoz leads SEO for a portfolio of U.S. service brands and is the author of Search Marketing: A Practical Field Guide, free to read and listen to on this site. More about Alejandro →