Posts Tagged ‘search’

Written by: Matt Carter of Matt’s Affiliate Marketing Blog

One of the biggest lessons I learned in my Internet marketing career is understanding how to find people online that are ready and willing to buy! Once I worked out how to do this, my Internet marketing efforts really started to take off. In this post I’m going to share with you some tips to help you master this vital online marketing concept.

Finding the Buyers

Keyword data is the biggest factor that distinguishes online marketing from the offline world. Before the days of Google and keyword data, businesses relied heavily on market research companies to provide insight into the mind of the consumer.

These days we can simply analyze the keywords they type into Google and base a lot of our decisions on this. You might think this is obvious, however you would be amazed at how many people fail to grasp this.

Commercial Intent

This leads me onto my next point; ‘Commercial Intent’. This is simply judging how likely a person is to buy, based on the keywords they use in their search.

Ideally, you want to be driving traffic to your sites on keywords with high commercial intent, as these keywords will convert at much higher rates than more general, information-seeking keywords.

Example Searcher

Let’s look at an example to demonstrate this point more clearly. If a person types “acne” into Google, I would consider this to be a low commercial intent keyword, the reason being that we can’t tell what their intention is at this stage. They may just want to learn about acne and how many people have it, or the main causes of acne. These searches are known as “information seeking keywords,” and they’re not likely to result in high conversions to sales for you.

However, let’s say that the person who typed “acne” into Google did in fact have bad acne and needed a cure. The next thing he/she might do, after they browsed some websites about acne, is head back to Google and refine the search a bit more.

They might start researching the kind of acne they have, and type into Google “Types of Acne.” This is not a buyer keyword, but it may reveal to the searcher that they have a type of acne known as cystic acne.

So they might now type into Google “cystic acne treatment” and read some more webpages about possible acne treatments that you can use. At this stage, the commercial intent of the keyword has increased, and the conversions to sales also increase with it. We know exactly what the searcher’s problem is and that they are looking for a solution for it.

You can take this even further by getting very specific, and get extremely high commercial intent with keywords like “buy cystic acne treatment.” When you see the word “buy” in the search phrase, the searcher is blatantly telling you that they are ready to buy.

Conversions & Profits

Essentially, the higher the commercial intent, the higher the conversion rate for keywords and the more profit you will make. Therefore, it is important to build your websites on keywords that have a high amount of commercial intent.

What you must keep in mind, though, are the traffic stats for a keyword. It’s all well and good to be targeting a super-high commercial intent keyword, but if no one is searching for it, then you won’t make a penny.

When I look at keyword figures I usually aim for no less than 500 exact match searches a month in the local market I am targeting. I then start with half a dozen keywords and build my sites from there, with the intention to grow the list of keywords I’m targeting out over time.

Also, I will often target lower search volume buyer keywords as my secondary keywords for a page. For example, if my primary keyword for a page is “cystic acne treatment” I might target “buy cystic acne treatment” as a secondary phrase to collect that extra bit of buyer traffic to that page.

Although there are several more steps to creating profitable affiliate sites, building on a solid foundation of buyer keywords is the most important thing to get right.

About the Author

Matt Carter is a full-time Internet marketer based in Australia. His main focus online is building affiliate sites and doing search engine optimization. To learn more about Matt and his free video training, please visit Matt’s Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Posted by: Bob Dunlap, Director of Marketing

Virtually all mature markets have at least two strong, if not dominant, competitors.  Right now, Internet search has only one, named Google.  While Google is clearly the 800lb gorilla, competitors like Yahoo and MSN are always working on their algorithms, tools, and partnerships in an effort to take some of Google’s market share.

Now, Google may have yet another competitor. Former employees of the Mountain View, CA firm have launched Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search portal. They say it delivers more relevant results than any other search engine (yeah, I know, we’ve heard that before…). Will it be as good as or better than Google? Will it deliver the results that surfers and affiliate marketers are looking for? It’s way too early to tell.

Putting a dent in Google’s search dominance has proven to be a very tall task. Is this finally the one to watch? We’ll all stay tuned to see if “cool” lives up to its name.