People no longer ask for recommendations the way they used to: they search for a knife sharpening service on Google and trust what they find. If you're not there, to many customers it's as if you don't exist.
Buyers search in the vocabulary of the trade — process, material, tolerance, finish — not in marketing words. Keyword research here means reading the enquiries and quotes you already send, not asking a generic tool.
The volumes are tiny and worth a great deal: forty searches a month can be the order that carries the year. This work is judged by the enquiries that arrive, never by the traffic curve.
This sector moves slowly and then holds: once a process page ranks it tends to stay, because almost nobody publishes against it. Budget a year and judge it on enquiries, not on a monthly chart.
One page per process and per material beats one services page listing all of them. The buyer types the process; a page that covers eight of them ranks for none, and the one that covers one ranks for years.
More and more people ask ChatGPT and AI assistants for a recommendation instead of scrolling Google. We structure your knife sharpening service's content so those tools understand what you do and put your name forward when someone asks.