The Google Ads Keywords Your Bigger Competitors Won't Bother With

If you're a start-up or emerging brand selling into a vertical like beauty, supplements or fashion, you already know the maths doesn't work in your favour when it comes to earning attention. The businesses ranking above you on the obvious search terms have marketing budgets you can't get anywhere near, and no amount of brand polish closes that gap if you're both bidding on the same handful of search terms.

The founders we work with often present this as a budget problem, and that’s not wrong, but going after the same terms is the wrong lever to pull. You don't need a bigger budget to compete in a saturated category, you need to stop competing for the same search terms as everyone else.

WHY THE OBVIOUS KEYWORDS ARE THE WORST ONES TO FIGHT OVER

Broad category terms such as "frizzy hair," "protein powder," "women's jeans" get the most search volume, which is exactly why they're expensive and exactly why the biggest players win them. High volume attracts high competition, and whoever can absorb the highest cost-per-click for the longest survives there. If you're smaller, that's a fight you will lose.

What's easy to miss is that most of that volume isn't your customer yet. Someone searching "haircare" could be years from buying or ready to check out today - the term alone doesn't tell you which. What a more specific term buys you isn't proof that someone's ready to buy. It's proof of what they'd need to see to consider it. A search for "shampoo for type 2a hair" might still be research-stage, but you at least know what page to put in front of them. That relevance is worth more than volume on a term where you have no idea what the person typing it actually wants.

TARGET HOW CUSTOMERS SEARCH ONCE THEY’VE ALREADY NARROWED IT DOWN

Every saturated vertical has a second layer of search behaviour underneath the obvious terms: the specific, self-descriptive language people use once they've stopped browsing and started looking for something that fits them. A haircare customer moves from "frizzy hair" to searching by specific pain points or desired outcomes. A supplements customer moves from "protein powder" to searching by the specific outcome or dietary challenge they're solving. A fashion customer moves from "jeans" to searching by fit, size range, or body type.

These terms have a fraction of the search volume of the category search terms, which is exactly why they're cheaper and why fewer of your bigger competitors bother properly building campaigns around them. However, the person typing them has already done the work of telling you what they want. You're not competing on price for their attention anymore, because you're one of the few advertisers who bothered to structure a campaign around the specific way they searched.

The practical exercise is simple to describe and genuinely useful to sit down and do. List the ways a customer in your category would describe their specific need once they'd stopped browsing generally. Not your product categories, their words. Then check whether you're currently running any campaign structure built around those terms at all, or whether your account is still organised around the broad category terms you assumed you had to own.

WHAT THIS LOOKED LIKE FOR MOO + YOO

We saw this play out with Moo + Yoo, a luxury vegan haircare brand competing against hefty beauty brands with budgets they had no chance of matching. Rather than building Google Ads around broad haircare terms, we structured campaigns around how customers actually search once they know their hair type - language like "2a hair products" or "4b curl routine" rather than "frizzy hair."

The gap in cost was stark: "fine hair" averaged £7.52 a click against £0.11 for "type 1A hair"; "frizzy hair shampoo" averaged £2.40 against £0.41 for "type 2c hair shampoo." The trade-off is real, once you are this specific search volume drops by roughly three-quarters, from around 6,500 to 1,300 a month, but at this budget, that's the right side of the trade to be on.

Over a year, Moo + Yoo saw a 96.5% increase in new customers. It wasn't the keyword shift working alone: in order to support the ‘hair type’ approach a hair type quiz was added to the site and promoted across both Google and Meta. This added to the funnel length but helped guide decision making and built strong in-market engagement. With little else changing in the business or the wider marketing mix, finding this cheaper route to compete on Google was a large part of what drove that new customer increase.

This pattern shows up across saturated categories: the broad term is where you'll always be outspent, and the specific term underneath it is where a smaller budget can still win.

WHERE THIS DOESN’T WORK

This isn't a workaround for every acquisition problem. If your category genuinely has no meaningful search volume outside the broad terms, this approach won't manufacture demand that doesn't exist, you'll need a different acquisition strategy entirely. And it only pays off if what happens after the click matches the specificity of the search. If someone searches by a specific fit of jeans and lands on a generic product page with no such mention, you've won a cheap click but then lost it again immediately. The targeting shift has to be matched by the landing page experience and relevance, or it's not worth doing.

If you're not sure whether your category has this kind of underlying search behaviour, or whether your account is currently structured to catch it, you can book in for a 30 minute call with us and we’ll talk through your options.