Buyer Intent Keywords: All You Need To Know
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Buyer intent keywords are the keywords and search terms that people use on search engines when they are looking to buy a product or a service. This gives your business ample opportunity to target the right audiences as when buyer intent keywords are used, it’s a sign that the user is ready to make a purchase.
Building an intent-based PPC campaign can set you ahead of your competition. At Embryo, we understand that by knowing how and what your customers are searching for, we can begin targeting your key audience within your paid search campaigns. To learn more about how we can help with your keywords, feel free to get in touch with our team by phone at 0161 327 2635 or by email at info@embryo.com.
The Buyer Journey
To understand buyer intent keywords, we want to start by looking at the buyer’s journey. This journey is what a customer goes through when they begin looking for a product or service. In its simplest form, this can be divided into 3 stages: awareness, consideration and decision.
- Awareness: The customer becomes aware they have a problem
- Consideration: The customer understands their problem and considers options to solve it
- Decision: The customer decides on their solution and begins searching with the intent on the right provider to administer it. This search ends with a purchase.
Buyer intent keywords are vital during the decision stage as when the customer reaches their final purchasing decision, they use buyer intent keywords to look for specific products or services.
While buyer intent keywords are the most valuable to your PPC campaigns (as these are the ones that drive the final purchase), they are not one-size-fits-all. The intent behind the keywords your potential customers are searching online can be wildly different from one user to another and can affect converting searches into sales. Buyer intent keywords can be generally segregated into either high or low-intent keywords.
High Intent Keywords
These keywords are often specific and direct, which are the most promising for businesses to convert searches into purchases. Brand keywords are a perfect example. These are search terms that include the name of a specific brand or a branded product. They can provide a high return on ad spend (ROAS) as customers searching for this are heavily considering making a purchase.
Low Intent Keywords
These keywords usually include question terms such as ‘what’, ‘why’ or ‘how’. These have lower buyer content as it is more of a general search indirectly related to looking at parallel solutions rather than a targeted product or service.
Seems simple, right? For paid search, the best keywords to target seem to be high buyer intent keywords but this is dependent on your type of product or service. If it is a high-consideration purchase, for example, an expensive bed, you may wish to target a number of lower-intent keywords as the intent to purchase is still there, but you may need to work harder to have the user take the step into deciding to purchase.
The 4 Types of Buyer Intent Keywords
As mentioned above, buyer intent keywords are terms people enter that signal they are actively looking to make a purchase. The trick is to know what buyer intent keywords your target audience is using to incorporate into your paid search campaigns. Being more intentional with your keywords towards your audience will help further scale your conversion rate and sales within your campaigns. Therefore it is vital to understand the 4 types of buyer intent keywords:
- Informational – to learn something and answer potential questions
- Navigational – to locate a specific website
- Transactional – to make a purchase
- Commercial – to learn about a product or service in order to make a purchase
Informational Keywords
These are informal searches that usually start with a question, like ‘How do I…’, ‘Can you…’. These low-intent keywords are often used earlier in the buyer’s journey and don’t often get potential customers to buy, rather they inform them that you can offer a solution to their problem.
When people are looking for a specific page or website, they may use navigational keywords. These include brand names, specific product names or a specific service, with the intention to get to the exact webpage they are looking for. For example, a customer searching for ‘IKEA bookshelf’ knows it will take them to a landing page on a specific site with those products.
Transactional Keywords
Transactional keywords are used when a customer wants to make an immediate purchase and have the most buyer intent behind them. The most common keywords surround ‘buy now’, ‘order’ or ‘near me’. The customer is ready and wants to make the purchase and will look for information on brand, price or location.
Commercial Keywords
Commercial (also known as investigative) keywords are used by customers who want to investigate or do further research on a brand or product. The user has found a solution to their problem and is doing comparative research to weigh potential options. These queries can include terms like ‘best’, ‘reviews’ and ‘compare’.
By understanding these search queries and the differences between them, you can create the right paid marketing campaigns for your audience. Depending on your business, some of these keywords will naturally be more valuable than others within your digital marketing strategies.
Targeting The Right Buyer Intent Keywords
To attract your target audience, convert them into purchasers and keep them as loyal customers – which type of keyword do you use? Customers rarely buy right away, and they usually prefer to buy from someone they recognise or trust. Therefore the main goal is to find keywords matching each stage of the buyer journey and implement these within your marketing strategies.
While transactional keywords predominately lead to the highest purchase intention, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should solely target these within your PPC campaigns. These keywords are likely to drive the best return on investment (ROI) so it is common for many paid search accounts to focus on transactional user intent. However, do expect more expensive cost-per-clicks overall due to fierce competition for bidding on these keywords.
So why target low-intent terms like informational keywords if they don’t lead to a purchase? The buyer’s journey begins with research, so many people likely have similar questions. By targeting this keyword type through your organic search strategies you can generate more attention around your service or products. You can also target this through your paid search campaigns as they play a vital role in increasing brand awareness and trust with potential customers, as well as help direct traffic back to your website through remarketing efforts.
Buyer intent keyword research is an important part of assessing which keywords your customers are searching for. Once you understand the customer’s buyer journey and where the buyer is within it, you gain a better understanding of how to get the customer to the finish line of purchasing.
Buyer Intent Keywords: Need To Know More?
Keeping the potential buyer’s perspective at the heart of your digital marketing strategy to make it truly successful. Targeting the right buyer intent keywords results in a dramatic improvement to your paid search to capture your target audience, directing them to your website and setting up more qualified leads or sales. Well-informed paid campaigns that follow effective, targeted keywords produce better results for less.
If you are concerned that your digital marketing strategy is not targeting the right keywords for your business, Get in touch with our team today by phone at 0161 327 2635 or through email at info@embryo.com.
