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Building your keyword list is like building the foundations to a house, it needs to be solid otherwise you will wake up one morning under a pile of bricks.

I think generally people do not spend enough time and effort into ensuring that their keywords are upto scratch for PPC campaigns or SEO, just take a look for example at this search term - Anyone typing in the search term ‘keyword’ definitely doesn’t want to find information on a London Dental Studio or be after a payday loan, people responsible for setting up a campaign then copying and pasting the heading ‘keyword’ into the keywords which you are bidding on deserve to be shot, OK bit extreme but you get my jist.

Anyway, when building your keyword list many factors need to be taken into account

• Search Volume
• Single Keywords or Phrases and Relationships
• Word Variations (Singular, Plural, Mispellings, Root Words)
• Relevance
• User Intent

You will notice above that I have made user intent italic, because I think this can be quite an oversight and I believe this needs serious thought when building keyword lists. If you are a small to medium sized business your marketing efforts need to work for you which is why you need to be attracting people which want your product and show this in their search query.

Someone searching for bread has a lot less intent to purchase than say a user searching for ‘bread maker’ you need to be using keywords that people use when they are in the buying cycle - these convert at a higher rate, and keywords used when they are in the later part of the buying cycle convert better than those used at the start of the buying cycle for example ‘cricket bat’ is earlier than ‘Gunn & Moore Cannon Original LE’.

But you also need to bare in mind the broader term will drive higher traffic, that is where you need to make educated decisions which will drive the most sales, great use PPC to test which generates the most sales a month and then focus your organics towards the better performing keyword.

‘Cricket bat’ might drive 10,000 visits per month but only convert at a rate 0.01% and bring you 100 sales.

‘Gunn & Moore Cricket bat’ might drive just 2500 visitors but convert at a rate of 5% and bring you 125 sales.

So the lower traffic driving keyword produced more sales purely because of the higher conversion rate, this higher conversion rate is all to do with the difference in user intent behind the query and the position they are in in the buying cycle.

My point is this it is not all about traffic it is about getting relevant, targetted traffic which want what you have to offer.

Taking the example above you may then look at the profit on the 100 sales against the 125 sales and find the broader keyword had a higher average spend or you may not, I am just trying to demonstrate the difference user intent in keywords can make and how important it is to get you keyword lists right in SEO and PPC.

The key is to test, test and test.

Anyway I digress as the whole point of this post was to put you in the direction of a pretty good tool from Microsoft Adcenter Labs - Detecting Online Commercial Intention, it is really good 99% of the time although does get it wrong on occassions for example it believes there is commercial intent for the query ‘flea ridden cat’.

Are you putting enough time and effort into your keyword lists?

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