7 keyword research sources for England content teams, from IPO to HMRC

What to take away

Why public UK sources beat guesswork for England content teams

Keyword tools estimate. Public records state. When a sole trader in Leeds searches for a term, that term usually exists somewhere in an official document first: a tax form, a filing, a trade mark class, a statistical release.

England has an unusually rich set of these documents. Companies House registers millions of entities. HMRC publishes guidance for every tax a business can meet. The IPO records the exact words traders pay to protect. The ONS counts the businesses those words describe.

One caveat before you start: the IPO, HMRC, Companies House, the ONS and the ICO are UK-wide bodies, not English ones. That is a feature, not a flaw. The England breakdowns, regional tables and postcode filters inside each source are what turn UK-wide vocabulary into an England-specific plan.

That matters for content planning because official language is the language of intent. Someone searching for a phrase lifted from HMRC guidance is usually mid-task, not browsing. Someone searching a trade mark class is usually comparing suppliers.

The alternative is guessing from autocomplete and competitor pages. That works until you need to justify a content budget. A named public source is defensible in a planning meeting. A tool's difficulty score is not.

This is the same argument behind building an England market guide, where source selection comes before tool selection.

The seven sources at a glance

IPO trade mark records as a keyword source

The UK Intellectual Property Office holds a searchable register of every registered trade mark in the country. Each record carries the mark itself, the goods and services classes, the owner and the status.

For keyword research, the value is in the words. A trade mark is a word a business has bet money on. If fifty companies in the same class have registered marks containing the same noun, that noun is a market, not a coincidence.

Start with a broad class. Class 9 covers software and electronics. Class 35 covers advertising and business services. Class 42 covers technology and design services. Search a term you already suspect is commercial and see who owns it.

Then read the descriptions. Trade mark specifications use formal language that rarely appears in marketing copy but often appears in search. Words like apparatus, consultancy, provision of, namely. Those phrases are weak keywords on their own, but they reveal adjacent terms worth testing.

Status matters too. A mark that is registered and renewed signals an active market. A mark that has lapsed signals a market that cooled. Neither is a volume figure, but both are direction.

Use the register to build a seed list, not a final list. Take the recurring nouns, strip the brand names, and test the remainder. This is the same discipline you would apply when choosing the best tools by their data and sources: know what the source can and cannot tell you.

A quick IPO routine

HMRC guidance and tax term demand

HM Revenue & Customs publishes guidance for every tax, allowance and filing obligation a UK business can face. That guidance is written to be found, which makes it a keyword corpus hiding in plain sight.

Think about who searches tax terms. A new limited company director looking for the first time at a corporation tax deadline. A sole trader checking whether a side income needs declaring. An employer working out statutory sick pay. These are people with a task, a deadline and a willingness to read.

Mine the guidance for the phrases that head each page and each section. Those headings are the words HMRC expects people to search, tested against a national audience.

Pay attention to the gap between the formal term and the search term. HMRC writes Self Assessment. People search self assessment tax return, tax return deadline, how to file a tax return. The formal term is the topic; the variants are the keywords.

Also watch for acronyms. PAYE, VAT, CIS, MTD. Acronyms have high intent and low competition in many niches, because few content teams bother to explain them plainly.

If your England audience includes freelancers, contractors or small employers, HMRC guidance is the closest thing to a free intent survey you will get. Pair it with your own search console data before committing to a content calendar.

Companies House filings for competitor and sector terms

Companies House holds filings for every registered company in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Filings include accounts, confirmation statements, officer appointments and registered addresses.

This is the most underused keyword source in the UK. It tells you what businesses actually call themselves and what they say they do. That naming language is raw market vocabulary.

Search by SIC code to find every company in a sector. Read the company names. Read the nature of business descriptions. Patterns appear fast: the same three or four nouns recur across hundreds of small firms.

Use it for competitor mapping too. If you know a competitor's registered name, you can see its filing history, its officers and any name changes. Name changes often track repositioning, which tracks new keyword territory.

Regional filtering is the real prize for England teams. You can isolate companies by postcode area and see how sector vocabulary shifts between, say, Greater Manchester and Greater London. That is how you avoid writing one generic page and pasting a city name into it.

Treat filings as a discovery layer. They give you terms and entities, not volumes. Volume comes later, from a tool or from your own site data.

ONS releases for demand and benchmark context

The Office for National Statistics publishes the numbers that tell you whether a keyword is worth chasing. Business demography data shows how many businesses exist, where they are and how long they survive.

That matters because keyword demand follows business population. A term about starting a company has a large audience. A term about closing one has a smaller but more urgent audience.

The ONS business demography release is a good starting point for sector and region comparisons. It breaks down births, deaths and survival rates by industry and geography.

ONS data will not give you search volume. It gives you the shape of the market the volume sits in. For a fuller treatment of that distinction, see the argument that market size in England is a demand question rather than a single number.

Reading an ONS release for keywords

Business Population Estimates for audience size

The Business Population Estimates are the annual count of private-sector businesses in the UK, published by the government department responsible for business policy. Unlike Companies House, they cover the smallest firms and the self-employed who never file accounts — usually the largest part of a keyword audience.

The estimates split the total by region, by industry, by legal status and by employment size band, from businesses with no employees upwards. That structure is a keyword map in itself. A one-person business searches for registration and self assessment; a company with staff searches for payroll, employer's liability insurance and HR.

Read the England figures against the UK total, and use the regional split to decide which sectors justify their own content cluster. Treat the counts as a ceiling for the size of the audience, never as search volume.

GOV.UK content guidance on planning to user needs

GOV.UK runs one of the largest content operations in the world, and it publishes its method. Its guidance on organising and grouping GOV.UK content is the most useful single document for any England content team.

Its core instruction is to start from user needs, not from organisational structure. That sounds obvious until you audit a site and find the navigation mirrors the org chart.

The guidance covers how to research user needs, how to map them to content, and how to decide whether a page should exist at all. For keyword research, that last point is the sharpest. A keyword with volume is not a reason to publish.

The companion guidance on retiring content explains how to review existing content, when to update it and when to retire it. Most England content teams have more to gain from pruning than from publishing.

Use both documents as a filter. Run your keyword shortlist through them and ask whether each term maps to a genuine user need. The ones that survive are your briefs.

This pairs well with any cost guide from source data, because the cheapest keyword is the one you already rank for and simply need to maintain.

The ICO register and data-protection terms

The Information Commissioner's Office keeps the public register of data controllers — the organisations that pay the data protection fee and tell the ICO what they do with personal data. Each entry gives the organisation's name, its address and the purposes for which it handles data.

Search the register by name, by sector or by postcode to see who is in a market, then read the data purposes for the vocabulary. The register and the ICO's guidance pages are written in the language of the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR: personal data, data controller, lawful basis, consent, privacy notice, subject access request, data protection officer, data breach.

These are terms people search when they are worried rather than browsing. An office manager looking for a privacy notice, a practice manager asking whether they need a data protection officer, a marketer checking whether the company has to register with the ICO — every one is a task with a deadline behind it.

Mine the ICO's guidance headings the way you mine HMRC's, and filter the register by England postcodes as you would with Companies House. The register shows who is in the market; the guidance shows what they need to know next.

Turning seven sources into a keyword shortlist

Seven sources produce a lot of raw material. The job is to reduce, not to collect. Here is a sequence that works in a single working session.

Worked example: a payroll content cluster

Suppose you write for England accounting firms. You search Companies House by the payroll SIC code and find hundreds of small providers using the same four nouns in their names.

You open HMRC guidance and collect the headings around PAYE, statutory pay and reporting deadlines. You check the IPO register for marks in the relevant classes and note the recurring service wording.

You check ONS business demography and see how many businesses in that sector exist and whether the count is rising. You compare that with the wider Business Population Estimates — the annual count of UK private-sector businesses, including the smallest firms — checking the 2022 figures against the newest edition before settling your scope.

You filter your list through the GOV.UK planning guidance and drop two terms that map to no real user need.

What remains is a shortlist of perhaps twenty terms across four themes, each traceable to a public source. That is a defensible content plan, and it took an afternoon.

The four themes usually fall out of the sources themselves — payroll outsourcing, PAYE registration, statutory sick pay and payroll software — and each carries several terms beneath it.

What each source cannot do

Common questions