Lots of organic traffic equals big profits, right?
Actually the truth is it’s not quite as simple as that. Brian Dean, of uber-popular SEO site Backlink.io, tells a story about how he once had a website that was getting more than 60,000 unique visitors every single month!
Most people would expect a website like that would be making thousands of dollars a month. Unfortunately for Brian that wasn’t the case.
In fact this high traffic website only made Dean a relatively paltry $400 a month. The reason? He had focused on the wrong type of keywords.
You see Brian was getting plenty of traffic but it wasn’t the right kind of traffic. It lacked it “commercial intent”.
The people that were coming to Brian’s website weren’t ready to buy, so all of that traffic wasn’t converting into sales.
What Brian (and many other website owners) lacked was a focus on “Buyer Keywords”.
In this guide I’m going to explain what buying keywords are and why they are some of the easiest searches to convert.
I’ll show you how to find these buying keywords (no matter what niche you are in) and how to measure how difficult it would be to rank for those keywords.
Buying keywords are the “low hanging fruit” of Amazon Affiliate content creation. They are the best place to start when selecting content topics for your Amazon Affiliate website.
Important Note – In this guide I’ll show you how to identify your own buyer keywords. But if you want to fast track your results then I recommend you pick up one of our keyword packs. Our keyword packs are specifically designed to target valuable, low competition buyer keywords.
Understanding The Importance of Buyer Intent
To understand the importance of buying keywords we need to get inside the mind of customer. We are looking for indication that they are close to the point where they are considering buying.
Imagine for a second a person at the shopping mall. Mother’s day is coming up and they are looking to purchase a scarf for their mom. They want to make a purchase and they have the funds available.
Now they are just looking for a scarf which will offer them the best quality and price for their budget.
As an Amazon Affiliate we act as a guide to show them where in the mall to make the purchase. The important point is that we know that this person is ready to buy a scarf we just need to point them in the right direction to earn our commission.
This type of “ready to buy” shopper has a high level of buyer intent.
How Buyer Intent Translates To Choosing Keywords
Consider two people. The first person enters the keyword “cheap lawn mowers” into Google. This is a person who is clearly looking to buy an inexpensive lawn mower.
They are probably already convinced that they need to buy a lawnmower and now want to find one which will meet their budget. This is a buyer keyword.
A second person might enter the keyword “lawn mower repair”. This person is obviously looking to repair their lawn mower.
They may need to buy a new lawn mower if the future (depending on how well their repair works out) but for now they are probably not about to buy.
Or consider a more general keyword like “lawn mower”. This phrase doesn’t provide the same type of buying intent as our first example.
In fact it is difficult to know from this keyword what the searcher is looking for, beyond the fact they have a general interest in lawn mowers.
One of the mistakes that new Amazon Affiliate make is to look only at the top volume of search for a keyword.
A keyword like “lawn mowers” will definitely be much more searched for than a buying keyword like “cheap lawn mowers” but this doesn’t necessarily make it more valuable.
Plenty of searches for “lawn mower” will be people who aren’t looking to buy right now.
Examples of Buying Keywords
Here are some of the most common examples of buying keywords:
- best [product name]
- [product name] reviews
- cheap [product name]
- top rated [product name]
- [product name 1] vs [product name 2]
- top 10 [product name]
- best [product name] under $xxx
- where to [product name]
- best rated [product name]
- [product name] for sale
If you want to laser target your content creation even further, I strongly recommend that you focus specifically on best[product name] and [product name] review.
These buyer keywords convert like hot cakes! And they are highly suitable for the content creation approach I’ll detail below.
Why You Should Focus on Buying Keywords for New Websites
Buying keywords are the low hanging fruit of Amazon affiliate websites. As the above examples hopefully illustrate, you can see why the traffic generated by a buying keyword will have a relatively high conversion rate.
When you are starting out with your website you want to focus on the areas that are going to be the most immediately profitable.
By focusing on buying keywords you can start to generate profits, which can potentially be reinvested into your business.
Over the long term you may want to focus more on broader and more “informational” keywords. Information keywords are particular useful in order to attract backlinks.
But start your website with a solid foundation of content which targets buying keywords for faster results.
How To Find Buyer Keywords Using Google Keyword Planner
Keyword research is an area that many people struggle with (another good reason to purchase one of our keyword packs). When Spencer Haws, of Niche Pursuits and LongTailPro fame, surveyed his audience he found that:
“The most common problem that people have when trying to start up a new website is finding the right keywords to target.”
Luckily keyword research for Buyer Keywords is actually pretty easy. To do buyer keyword research you are going to use the Google Keyword Planner (GKP).
GKP is a free tool provided to their Adwords customers. Luckily you only need to register a Google Adwords account to access the tool, but you don’t need to actually run ads.
You can find Google Keyword Planner tool here:
Step #1: Once you have logged into your GKP account you will enter your “seed keyword”. This is the primary keyword that defines the product that you are targeting.
For example, if you have a headphone review website then your see keyword might be “headphones”.
Step #2: Next add on buyer prefixes to your primary seed keyword. Examples of buyer prefixes that you could include are:
- Review
- Top 10
- Cheap
- Best
- Budget
- Affordable
- Buy
Then add these complete phrases into the box marked “Only include keywords containing the following items:”
Step #3: Sort the results by “Avg. Monthly Searches” to quickly identify the buyer keywords which have the most search. This can indicate which keywords may be the most worthwhile trying to target.
Step #4: Look at the suggested bid column. This is the amount that advertisers are bidding on Google Adwords for that keyword.
We are not actually using Adwords to target these keywords but these numbers are still useful. The bid shows how valuable advertisers consider the keywords to be.
A buyer keyword with a high CPC will typically convert at a higher rate into a buying customer. Advertisers will only be willing to bid a high price if the search term was valuable.
Looking At The Competition For Your Buyer Keywords
Using GPK you can identify the buyer keywords for your product vertical and have a reasonably good measure of how valuable they are.
But there are two sides to choosing which buyer keywords to target. You also need to look at the existing competition to decide which keywords you want to try and rank for.
Deciding which keywords to target, will mean balancing these two aspects. A highly valuable buyer keyword which has a large number of searches each month might be worth targeting even if it is relatively challenging to rank for. A buyer keyword with a low CPC, few searches and high amount of competition will probably best be skipped.
When examining competition you only need to look at the top ten competing websites for that search. This is true even though there might be tens of thousands of other web pages that feature that same keyword.
The reason is that if you can’t get your website on the first page you are likely to receive a very marginal amount of traffic.
Also, if you do get featured on the first page then you are automatically going to outrank all of those other competing websites on page two and later.
One good free tool to use to determine the relative competition of a particular keyword is the free SEO MOZ addon for Chrome. This will show you the Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) for each the top ten results for that particular keyword.
As your own website gains backlinks and increases in authority you are going to be able to rank for more difficult keywords. When starting out though you should target only those keywords where the average DA is relatively low.
To determine this add up the DA for all of the results for a particular buyer keyword. The divide this by 10. This will give you an average for the PA and DA for that search.
A good rule of thumb is that if the average PA is above 30 then it is going to difficult to rank for that keyword.
Obviously the lower the average PA the easier you will find it to rank your own content.
Creating Content To Target Buyer Keywords
Now you know which keywords you want to target, you need a content plan to target them. If you are a customer of one of our keyword packs then you also receive our Amazon Affiliate guide which explains in detail how to create high converting content to target buyer keywords.
But, put simply there are two main approaches to creating content for buyer keywords.
The first is to create a product review. This is the best approach if you are using the buyer keyword “[product name] review”.
A good review will include a headline, an introduction to the product, key features and specifications of the product, the avg. Amazon review, several negative points about the product and a conclusion. Placed throughout the review will be links to the product on Amazon.
The second approach is to create is a product roundup. This is very good for targeting keywords like “best [product name]”. Here you will be explaining what distinguishes a good product in your category and comparing some of the leading brands.
Typically a product round up should begin by introducing the product and explaining what features people should pay attention to. You should then explain how to select the best product in the category.
Follow this with reviews of up to fifteen of the best products in the category (along with Amazon links) and end with a final recommendation.
Creating these types of articles does take work but they also tend to convert into buyers extremely well.
Recap
Targeting buyer keywords is the easiest and fastest way to start building a profitable Amazon Affiliate website. With Buyer Keywords you can start making money even with a relatively low amount of search engine traffic. Follow the steps below to identify and use buyer keywords for your product.
- Use Google Keyword Planner to identify buyer keywords
- Measure the amount of monthly search traffic and Avg. CPC
- Use MozBar addon to measure competitiveness
- Create single product reviews and product round ups to target the buyer keywords
