That was the next instruction from the same NYC client we’ve been working with.
Quick recap if you missed the earlier posts: a local service business, 20 pages on their website, competing against established players with 500–1,000 pages of content dominating both organic results and the map 3-pack in New York.
We’d already tackled their SEO strategy. We’d already dissected how a competitor with just 30 pages was beating everyone on brand recognition alone.
Now they had a new requirement.
“We only want people who are ready to book. No window shoppers.”
On paper, it sounds smart. Why waste resources on people who are “just researching”, right?
Here’s where it gets interesting – because this particular business does residential moving services. Not emergency plumbing. Not a same-day locksmith. Nobody wakes up at 2am in a panic and books a moving company.
People plan a move weeks, sometimes months in advance. They research. They compare. They ask neighbors. They read reviews. They sleep on it. And then they book.
So when this client said “we only want buyers” – they were essentially asking to meet people at the finish line of a race they hadn’t been running in.
What “high intent keywords” actually means.
When clients say high intent, they usually mean bottom-of-funnel queries like:
- “moving company near me”
- “best movers in NYC”
- “moving company price Queens”
- “same day movers Manhattan”
These keywords are valuable. No question. The people searching them are close to a decision.
But here’s the catch:
Those are also the most crowded, most expensive, most brutally competitive keywords in any local market. CPCs are inflated. Local packs are locked up. Every moving company with an SEO budget is swinging at the same terms.
Focusing only here is like opening a restaurant and refusing to put a sign on the street – only serving people who already decided to walk in.
You might survive. You won’t dominate.
What about the people who aren’t ready yet – but will be in six weeks?
There’s an entire layer of searches happening long before anyone types “movers near me”:
- “how far in advance should I book a moving company”
- “what to look for when hiring movers in NYC”
- “how much does it cost to move a 2-bedroom apartment in Manhattan”
- “questions to ask a moving company before hiring”
These people are not ready to book today. But they are actively building the list of companies they’ll consider when they are.
Ignore them, and you force your business into a knife fight at the very end of the decision cycle – where price, proximity, and luck decide the winner.
Show up earlier, and you:
- Shape how they think about the problem
- Set the criteria they’ll use to choose a provider
- Become the name they already recognize when they finally open their wallet
By the time they type a high-intent keyword, they’re not really searching the market. They’re searching to confirm the name already in their head.
That name can be yours – if you were present earlier in the journey.
So is “only high-intent keywords” a viable strategy?
Viable? Yes.
Optimal? Not even close.
You can build a business that survives on bottom-funnel terms – especially with strong word-of-mouth or offline reputation. But:
- You’ll pay more in ads, discounts, and wasted effort competing for the same short list of keywords
- You’ll be vulnerable to every algorithm update and every new competitor with a bigger budget
- Your lead flow will feel permanently spiky and unpredictable
A healthier model for a business like this:
Prioritize high-intent keywords for immediate conversions – and systematically show up for the questions people ask six weeks before they’re ready to book.
That doesn’t require a 300-post content library. It requires a few smart, strategic pages that speak to real early-stage questions – backed by remarketing, email, and the brand-building work we discussed in the previous post.
The real question was never “high intent or not?”
It was: do you want to be the company people stumble on at the last minute – or the one that quietly walked with them from their first Google search to the booking confirmation?
The first option can work.
The second builds a pipeline that compounds.