Keywords and commercial intent

If you read my last post you will know that I was pretty keyed-up about “Penny DVDs” getting a 1st page ranking in less than a week. I’m still excited, this is, after all, the name of the site – I would love to see it at the top of Google every day!

Let’s dig a little deeper though…

… “Penny DVDs” as well having a low monthly search volume of 260, does not have a high score when it comes to commercial intent. What am I talking about?

According to the Microsoft Commercial Intent Tool this phrase scores 28% in terms of “transactional intent” i.e. how interested someone is in making a purchase – this kind of information is extremely important if you are trying to sell something from your site.

Lets walk over to Google’s Keyword Tool and see what other keywords it suggests…

As well as alternative keywords, Google is kind enough to give us search volume data and an idea of how strong the competition is for a particular keyword or phrase.

From the suggestions, I felt the following had a good match with pages on the site (average search volume in brackets):

tv dvds (1,500,00)
comedy dvds (40,500)
series dvds (33,100)
dvds movies (18,100)
dvds tv series (2,900)
television dvds (2,400)
sitcom dvds (1,300)
tv show dvds (170)

…and here they are again with their score for commercial intent:

tv dvds (73%)
comedy dvds (86%)
series dvds (51%)
dvds movies (98%)
dvds tv series (55%)
television dvds (81%)
sitcom dvds (59%)
tv show dvds (84%)

As we can see “tv dvds” has by far the greatest search volume, a high commercial intent and a relatively high level of competition. Interestingly, the competition for “comedy dvds” is completely saturated, so compared to “comedy dvds”, “tv dvds” is still a better choice.

As you go down the list competition tends to drop off but commercial intent jumps around. Although relatively low search volumes: “television dvds” and “tv show dvds” have very high commercial intent.

This is really only scraping the surface, the big takeaway is to check the commercial intent of your keyword before trying to rank for it – no point ranking for a keyword if the people that type it in and arrive at your site are simply window shopping or searching for information – unless that of course is what you are delivering.

Just for the record PennyDVDs.com didn’t rank in the Top 100 for any of these keywords on Google.com or Goolge.co.uk I’ll let you know if that changes;-)