Online marketing takes hard work and time. One of the most important parts of online marketing is the keyword research. There are many keyword research tools on the market both paid and free, and they do a great job giving you detailed stats and recommendations about your main keywords.
Keyword research is similar to cooking a main dish in your kitchen or at a fancy restaurant. Each chef has a recipe for the same dish, maybe slightly different than the other, but it’s for the same dish. So what makes a chef more successful than the others? The answer is in the details. Maybe it’s the spice combination, maybe it’s how the food is marinated. Same rules apply for keyword research.
I will not get into the details of keyword research, nor this will be a Keyword Research 101 Guide.
I will talk about one simple criteria in keyword research that can make your online marketing campaign a big success, or a failure, and it is “Choosing the Higher Commercial Intention Keywords”.
What is “Commercial Value” or “Commercial Intention” of a Keyword?
A keyword’s “commercial value” or “commercial intention value” is used to estimate the conversion rate probability on your site or landing page. Higher the commercial value of the keyword, bigger chance the visitor will become a lead/customer.
To clear any confusion, we will go with a case study, also be very careful not to confuse conversion rate with CTR (click through rate).
Case Study: A prospective customer who’s shopping online for an LCD TV
The best online marketers are the ones that can walk in their prospective customers’ shoes. Let’s take a step back, forget about our landing page, and let’s talk about the different moods our prospective customers’ would be in before starting to search. Let’s start with categorizing these prospective customers:
1) Window Shoppers: They are likely only researching, not in the BUY mood now, maybe in the early stage buy mood.
If I was window shopping or just doing a very general research about LCD TV’s. I would use LCD TV’s, LCD TV Features, TV LCD, lifetime of an LCD TV, Plasma or LCD etc. for my keywords.
Even though these keywords have lower commercial value, creating guides about LCD tv’s, and general information landing pages would be perfect to target these keywords for my marketing campaign.
2) Prospective Customers who are in the “Middle Stage Buying Mood”.
These are the customers who probably have decided to buy an LCD TV, but not sure what to buy. They are most likely use keywords like; Compare Sony and Samsung LCD TV’s, LCD TV 1080 dpi, 120 Hz LCD TV, etc.
These keywords have higher commercial value than the first step’s keywords. To earn the visitors who are in the middle stage of buying process, we would want to send them to our LCD TV’s category pages, or keyword specific landing pages with both information and call to action.
3) Prospective Customers who are in “Ready to Buy Mood”.
These are prospective customers who are ready to buy an LCD TV. They might either use keywords like Buy LCD TV, Buy LCD TV online, Where to buy LCD TV online, Buy LCD TV free shipping, Purchase LCD TV Online, etc. or most likely more specific keywords like Samsung LN46A650 46-Inch 1080p LCD, Buy Samsung 46 Inch LCD, Compare Price Samsung 46 Inch 1080p, etc. Please visit Amazon’s Samsung LN46A650 46 Inch LCD TV page to see the keywords targeted.
These are the highest commercial value or highest commercial intent keywords, and we would like to send these visitors/prospective customers direct to the specific product and/or landing pages with clear “call to actions”.
Importance of Higher Commercial Value/Intent Keywords in PPC Marketing
You might create landing pages, category pages, and product pages and optimize all of these according to the commercial value of the targeted keywords within your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Plan. But, how about targeting these keywords within your PPC Campaigns?
You have now categorized your keywords depending on how high their commercial values are. You have started the PPC race one step ahead of your competition. With the right testing and tracking methods, you will be able to track your conversions, adjust and readjust the commercial values of your keywords, and determine your spending budget after sufficient testing period.
Or if you have a limited budget, you can skip the lower commercial value keywords after your keyword research, and only target the highest commercial intent keywords within your PPC Campaigns. This will save you big bucks, and increase your ROI from the beginning.
I hear a lot of people saying “We have great keywords, perfect ad text, high click through rate, a perfect landing page but we still lose money on PPC, What are we doing wrong?”. Even though the answer to this question depends on many variables, it might highly be the “Commercial Value of your Keywords”.
Microsoft adCenter Labs has a tool to “Detect Online Commercial Intention”
I have used the Microsoft’s Commercial Intention Tool, it’s not perfect, but it’s still in beta and it’s the only free tool out there to measure your keyword’s commercial intention value. It also works for domains.
It ranks keyword queries, and domains from 0 to 1 for their commercial intention value. Higher and closer it gets to 1, more commercial the keyword/domain is. Check it out yourself.
Happy keyword researches, and hope you will find the highest commercial value keywords for your PPC campaigns next time.
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Thank you Mr Kirtok. Good article.
wow thx so much.
i’m find high value keywords from many website.
Hi, I have my website bestbuylcd.com in 2nd page with “buy lcd” keyword, but not visitors, can you explain me why???
It’s always good to have an edge right from the beginning. Thank you for this well-written article.
@Best LCD TV: One of the most important part of keyword research is the “Keyword Volume Research”. Please use Google’s Free Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool for this. For “Buy LCD” keyword (exact match), I see around 2900/month searches on Google. This is a pretty low figure, and it’s highly possible that most of the searchers don’t visit the second page. You’d expect traffic on the second page results if you have a pretty high searched keyword targeted. You’re almost on the first page though, keep up the work on SEO. Good luck.
@ Serafettin Arslan, Tin, and Dr. Claude Windenberger: Thanks.
Thanks Ahmet Kirtok for sharing great post and I am agree with you that Keywords research is most important job in SEO. I am using wordtrackerdotcom and Google keywords generator tool. But due to hard competition its necessary to know about the Keywords commercial intent of our targeted keywords.
Excellent tool. I am also using this tool when i am searching the new keywords.
Thanks Kirtok