The Keyword Gap

What you rank for, against what the market actually rewards.

Every row below is a keyword that at least one of the fifteen model practitioners already ranks for nationally. The column that matters is Your position.

Here's where the data comes from. We harvested 4,279 ranked-keyword rows across 15 model domains, then deduplicated them once at the data root to 4,261 unique keywords. Volume, CPC, competition and intent came attached to those same rows, so no separate keyword-volume purchase was needed.

Your position is blank on every single row, because you rank for nothing. The blank column is the finding itself, not a formatting error. It's blunt, but it's also the most fixable problem in this report, and the four tables below show exactly where to start.

A. The contested keywords — where more than one practitioner competes

Of 4,261 unique keywords in the corpus, only 17 have two or more of the fifteen practitioners ranking for them. Sit with that number, because it's the most important one in this table. These practitioners aren't fighting over a shared market. Each has drifted into her own micro-territory and quietly owns a handful of terms nobody else contests.

The volumes here are small, but the commercial value is extreme. The table is sorted by CPC, the price advertisers pay for a single click, because that's what the market says a visitor is worth:

What to take from this table: the IFS cluster at the top is your opening. You're IFS-trained, and you already deliver sessions worldwide over Zoom. You are the right answer for "ifs therapy online," and your site has never once said so.

B. Highest commercial value inside your territory

These are the forty on-thesis keywords with the highest cost-per-click. Read this table with one idea in mind: CPC is the cleanest proxy we have for what a visitor is worth. When a term carries a high CPC and informational intent, that's the most valuable thing on this page. It means advertisers pay heavily to reach people you could reach for free, just by answering the question well.

C. Your territory — the broad view, by volume

If you study only one table, make it this one. Every term here sits inside subject matter you're already qualified in: IFS and parts work, somatic and nervous-system work, trauma, contemplative practice, near-death experience, embodiment. And for each term, at least one practitioner your size already ranks for it nationally. As you read, scan Volume/mo to see how big each audience is, then check Best rank to see how high a solo practitioner has actually climbed.

D. The unfiltered top by volume — and why it misleads

Sort the corpus purely by search volume and two outliers dominate it: tarabrach.com on broad meditation head terms and maineshaman.com on shamanism. The numbers are big, but they're attached to somebody else's territory. This table is here for completeness, to show you the shape of the whole space. It is not a target list. Chasing meditation at 135,000 searches a month against an established author with a twenty-year head start is the single most reliable way to waste a year. Take in the view, then go back to table C.

How to read the columns

• Your position — where you currently rank. Blank means not in the top 1,000 for that term.
• Models ranking — how many of the fifteen already rank for it. A high number means the term is genuinely winnable by a practitioner site, not just by institutions.
• Intent — what the searcher wants. informational terms are the ones that zero-click content and AI citation can win; commercial and transactional terms are the ones worth a dedicated page on your own site.
• CPC — what advertisers pay per click. It is the cleanest available proxy for commercial value, and a high-CPC informational term is the most valuable thing on this table.