Choosing a Keyword/Domain: Commercial Intent vs Traffic?

avatar33

avatar33

e-Hustler
Dec 5, 2009
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My negroes,

I'm trying to understand the value of traffic vs commercial intent in a keyword. At one point do you go for "keyword" and at what point do you go for "buy keyword"? (Knowing that obviously "keyword" has much more monthly search traffic)

Let's look at this fictional scenario:

www.potato-chips.com (150,000 exact searches /month)
www.buy-potato-chips.com (5,000 exact searches /month)

I know that ideally you'd get both domains and promote both keywords, but which one would you put more efforts/money into and which one do you think would generate more affiliate sales once ranked? I'm talking strictly AM revenue here (Amazon, CJ, Ebay, etc...) No Adsense.
 


The domain with "buy". Smaller audience, but they're the ones you want especially if monetizing how you described.

The consumer searching the term with "buy" has basically told you "I'm going to buy" - they just want to go to the right authority to do so. If monetizing strictly with affiliate offers, with the right sales copy and site design you'll convert.

When ranking for the generic term, people are looking for information, not always to buy - which is why it'd make sense to monetize with Adcents... Give them a taste of what they want to learn, send them onto someone else's site.

That's my two cents.

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Looking at the search volume ratio, I'd put more effort on potato-chips.com

But I would still develop both.
I have seen that all organic traffic is profitable,

Good thing about the first one is that you'd still rank decently for the buy keyword as well.
And also, a lot of people can be converted to buyers even if they come to the site without commercial intent.

I will keep the buy potato domain to rank separately plus use as a Lander from the main page. It's a no brainer, and you need both, unless your resource is extremely scarce

if the traffic for the first one was only 20-30K againts 5 K for the buy word, I would have only developed the buy domain and use the other as a buffer for links
 
@blogspotter but wouldn't you say that the "buy" domain would be a better choice if you wanted to generate a passive income? I mean, the way I look at it is that potato-chips.com would be a better choice if you were to start a high value website (or a business), build a mailing list, work on delivering useful content regularly. It could end up paying a lot more but it would certainly take much more work. Don't you think?
 
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I would go with potato-chips for sure.. If your site is done right you can transform traffic into buying customers, the domain itself is not that important..

In such big traffic differences the amount of more buyers that you got from the difference in traffic should make this one an easy answer.. With low traffic you get what you get.. With high traffic you can always improve the conversion rate of buying customers..
 
The idea is to go for both keywords. Simply going for "potato chips" probably has more traffic than "buying potato chips". Also, people who are actually searching for "potato chips" would probably have an inclination to buy as well. Usually the longer the keyword the fewer traffic you will get. Its usually a combination of balancing the traffic and buying intent.

Also the buying keywords tend to be more competitive...
 
My thumb rules for evaluating stuffs. - Generic product = product or service

Tier 1 - buy generic product, generic product for sale, cheap generic product, discount generic product, used generic product ect ect.
100%

Tier 2 - colored generic product, best generic product, generic product, generic product reviews
50-60%
Tier 3 - Info bout generic product with high value
5-15% (these vary more, theres sill winners but its not consistent)
Tier 4 - Info bout info, - blank facts, how to blank blank
2-10% (these vary more, theres sill winners but its not consistent)
 
there's no correlation between search volume and commercial intent. Look at people searching for a pizza place near where they live. The volume might be stupid low but the commercial intent is insanely high.

You need to be looking at monetization methods on the ranking sites (if they're all peppered with ads, or are amazon results, or google injected product results in the serps) as well as looking at the amount of ads on the actual serps. You can figure out the commercial intent of a keyword pretty well just by looking at the front page of the serps and all the little elements on it (<shameless-plug>which is actually what we're adding to serpIQ currently so that will be all automated </shameless-plug>)
 
From a publisher perspective the CPC cost of a keyword is an important value of its commercial intent. The long tail keyword is for searcher->prospect, the short tail is for generic searcher. You'll find a better ROI for a long tail keyword than for a short tail one.
 
dchuk said:
there's no correlation between search volume and commercial intent. Look at people searching for a pizza place near where they live. The volume might be stupid low but the commercial intent is insanely high.

You need to be looking at monetization methods on the ranking sites (if they're all peppered with ads, or are amazon results, or google injected product results in the serps) as well as looking at the amount of ads on the actual serps. You can figure out the commercial intent of a keyword pretty well just by looking at the front page of the serps and all the little elements on it (<shameless-plug>which is actually what we're adding to serpIQ currently so that will be all automated </shameless-plug>)
Click to expand...

dchuk, I'm not trying to figure out which keyword has commercial intent. It's obvious that a keyword that start with "buy" has a high commercial intent.

I'm trying to know what you guys value the most in a keyword: Commercial intent OR Traffic. (I know I know... we all want both but it's not always possible) In my OP, there is a major difference in traffic between the 2 keywords (150,000 vs 5,000), but there's also a big difference in commercial intent (Like Dwight said, someone that types "buy something" clearly is ready to buy and would be a highly valuable visitor). Which one is more valuable to you? Which one you think would deliver the best ROI versus the time/effort/money you'll spend developing/marketing it. Zat is Ze Question.
 
avatar33 said:
dchuk, I'm not trying to figure out which keyword has commercial intent. It's obvious that a keyword that start with "buy" has a high commercial intent.

I'm trying to know what you guys value the most in a keyword: Commercial intent OR Traffic. (I know I know... we all want both but it's not always possible) In my OP, there is a major difference in traffic between the 2 keywords (150,000 vs 5,000), but there's also a big difference in commercial intent (Like Dwight said, someone that types "buy something" clearly is ready to buy and would be a highly valuable visitor). Which one is more valuable to you? Which one you think would deliver the best ROI versus the time/effort/money you'll spend developing/marketing it. Zat is Ze Question.
Click to expand...

well what I was going for with my answer is that more traffic doesn't mean more money. Unless you're using PPC to test the profitability of a keyword, it's smarter from a long term perspective to go with the more obviously profitable keyword even if it has less overall search volume.

For instance, if my product front paged on news.ycombinator.com, I'd get a shit ton of traffic, but probably not that many signups. Now if I front paged on an aggregator for SEOs, that's much better traffic for me in terms of profitability even if it's lower. The people going to an SEO aggregator are definitely interested in SEO tools, whereas a more general aggregator only has a subsection of SEO users. It is analogous to what you're wrestling with.

So I, at first, would target the lower volume keyword.
 
dchuk said:
So I, at first, would target the lower volume keyword.
Click to expand...

You say "at first", so what you actually mean is that you'd save the generic option for future link building?

Generic keywords might be easier to rank and get longtails. So one can ask, would it be easier to get 300 generic longtails and convert them into a sale, or get 5 buyers and convert them into a sale. It depends on traffic volumes, how commercial the keyword is etc, but for the long term, I'd say go for:

www.potato-chips.com/buy-potato-chips

Make the buying page a bit more commercial, kinda landing page. And try to funnel the generic traffic into the commercial LP.

In addition to getting both generic and commercial, the buy-potato-chips page will be stronger because of the internal linking+authority of the domain for potato chips and related keywords.
 
If you are doing Adsense I would say definitely potato-chips.com (the difference in Adsense revenue for a buying keyword vs a not buying keyword is not enough to compensate for the big difference in traffic).

If you are doing a potato chips ecom store, I would say buy-potato-chips.com

But I agree with what blogspotter said. If you build a site that is ranking for potato chips, it will be much easier to also start ranking for buy potato chips.
 
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