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The tough thing here is that you're basically asking which is the less bad of two bad options. That's rough; I feel for you. Personally, I'd advocate taking an approach like the topic-focused one in Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts": https://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts I know it's hard, but you'll be doing a great service to your client by educating her on why her tail-chasing approach is a waste of time. Otherwise, the two approaches you've described are pretty much equally ineffective, so flip a coin, my friend.

Hi Lisa, Unfortunately, I can't find any authoritative documentation from Google (or from anyone else) on this since the rebranding of GWT. It sounds like both you and William are seeing the same thing - your pack rankings don't seem to be reflected. So, that's a start, but what I can't come up with is an answer as to whether the tool can somehow be configured to reflect these. I would suggest that you write to Google about this and see if you can get an official response. If you do, it would be super nice if you would share what you learn with the community here, as these are early days and everyone is still in a learning phase with this. So sorry not to have a clear answer for you on this good question!