How To Determine The Commercial Value Of A Keyword
- SEO |
Much has been written and continues to be written about keyword research, and for good reason. Keyword research is at the heart of Internet commerce of every type. To effectively do business on line, you need to understand the keywords that your future customers use to find your product. But you also need to know about the search volume, competition, relevancy and commercial intention of these keywords. Of all the facets of keyword research, the one I find most frequently missing from any discussion on the topic is commercial intention.
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of keywords: information keywords and buying keywords. Most searches are done by people looking for information. A small percentage of searches are done by people looking for something they wish to buy. It may appear obvious which is which, but it would be dangerous to make assumptions. Just as you should not guess which keywords people actually use on line, but rather find out about search volume using various tools, you should not guess about the commercial intention of a given keyword. It may be relevant to your web site and it may have high search volumes. But is it used by people looking for something to buy?
Fortunately you don't have to guess. Microsoft, bless their hearts, have a handy little tool that tells you the likelihood that a given keyword will result in a purchase. Just visit Detecting Online Commercial Intention: Audience Intelligence: adCenter Labs with me and let's go through it together. First, type your keyword in the "Tool Input" field. Be sure to click the Query radio button, then click Go. You will get a number between 0.5 and 1, plus a qualification of Commercial Intention or Non-commercial. You only want words with an index that indicates commercial intention, and the higher the better. Personally I like to shoot for 0.8 but this is not always possible. When you do your initial keyword research you always uncover related keywords you did not think of at first. When choosing the ones you want to compete for, you generally choose the ones with the highest search volume and lowest number of competing pages. Now you can toss commercial intention into the mix. You are better off with 1,000 searches a month and a commercial intention of 0.9 than 5,000 a month and no commercial intention at all.
Once you have culled your keyword list to include only good buying keywords, you can now visit Google Insights for Search. Under "Search Terms" type in your keyword. Then, under "Filter" choose "Product Search" and, optionally, your country. The resultant search will not give you the absolute number of product searches, but it will indicate the trend. Here we have a graph very similar to Google Trends, but it actually gives us the trend in product searches for our keyword in our own country. Obviously, an upward trend indicates that more and more people are using your keyword in product searches. This is valuable information. But we can make it just a little more valuable. My technique is to choose a moderate to high volume consumer product search term such as "microwave oven". We would never attempt to compete for such a term because it is too generic and too competitive. But if we could dominate a good buying keyword that had perhaps 10% as much product search volume as "microwave oven" then we would have a profitable niche. Fortunately you can search two things at once in Google Insights. So just click "Add Search Term" and search "microwave oven" together with your keyword. You will get both on a graph. Hover your mouse over the graph and you will see the relative search volume for both terms. If your niche is very narrow you may find that "microwave oven" has too much search volume to be used as a benchmark, so you will need to use a lower volume term. By testing various terms, perhaps ones you are quite familiar with, you will begin to get a feel for the product search volume of your niche keywords. If your keyword has a commercial intention of 0.8 or higher, and gets significant numbers of product searches when compared to major shopping search term then you have a winner.
Once you have this nailed down, you can be confident that your SEO efforts will pay off with more buyers than tourists to your site.
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of keywords: information keywords and buying keywords. Most searches are done by people looking for information. A small percentage of searches are done by people looking for something they wish to buy. It may appear obvious which is which, but it would be dangerous to make assumptions. Just as you should not guess which keywords people actually use on line, but rather find out about search volume using various tools, you should not guess about the commercial intention of a given keyword. It may be relevant to your web site and it may have high search volumes. But is it used by people looking for something to buy?
Fortunately you don't have to guess. Microsoft, bless their hearts, have a handy little tool that tells you the likelihood that a given keyword will result in a purchase. Just visit Detecting Online Commercial Intention: Audience Intelligence: adCenter Labs with me and let's go through it together. First, type your keyword in the "Tool Input" field. Be sure to click the Query radio button, then click Go. You will get a number between 0.5 and 1, plus a qualification of Commercial Intention or Non-commercial. You only want words with an index that indicates commercial intention, and the higher the better. Personally I like to shoot for 0.8 but this is not always possible. When you do your initial keyword research you always uncover related keywords you did not think of at first. When choosing the ones you want to compete for, you generally choose the ones with the highest search volume and lowest number of competing pages. Now you can toss commercial intention into the mix. You are better off with 1,000 searches a month and a commercial intention of 0.9 than 5,000 a month and no commercial intention at all.
Once you have culled your keyword list to include only good buying keywords, you can now visit Google Insights for Search. Under "Search Terms" type in your keyword. Then, under "Filter" choose "Product Search" and, optionally, your country. The resultant search will not give you the absolute number of product searches, but it will indicate the trend. Here we have a graph very similar to Google Trends, but it actually gives us the trend in product searches for our keyword in our own country. Obviously, an upward trend indicates that more and more people are using your keyword in product searches. This is valuable information. But we can make it just a little more valuable. My technique is to choose a moderate to high volume consumer product search term such as "microwave oven". We would never attempt to compete for such a term because it is too generic and too competitive. But if we could dominate a good buying keyword that had perhaps 10% as much product search volume as "microwave oven" then we would have a profitable niche. Fortunately you can search two things at once in Google Insights. So just click "Add Search Term" and search "microwave oven" together with your keyword. You will get both on a graph. Hover your mouse over the graph and you will see the relative search volume for both terms. If your niche is very narrow you may find that "microwave oven" has too much search volume to be used as a benchmark, so you will need to use a lower volume term. By testing various terms, perhaps ones you are quite familiar with, you will begin to get a feel for the product search volume of your niche keywords. If your keyword has a commercial intention of 0.8 or higher, and gets significant numbers of product searches when compared to major shopping search term then you have a winner.
Once you have this nailed down, you can be confident that your SEO efforts will pay off with more buyers than tourists to your site.