Commercial Intention

In the last article we looked at how to find an estimate of the number of monthly searches for a keyword using the free keyword tool from Google and finished off by looking at “commercial intent”.

Microsoft used to provide a free online tool to gauge commercial intent. It’s not available now, so I’ve removed the link. This article references the results obtained from the tool when it was still available.

Using this tool we can see that “personal coaching” is assessed as having non-commercial intention with a probability of 0.65. In other words, according to this tool 65% of people who search for “personal coaching” have no intention of spending money.

Now let’s try the keyword “personal fitness coach”. The tool assesses this keyword as having commercial intention with a probability of 0.68; or 68% of people who search on this keyword are likely to spend money.

This looks right to me because “personal fitness coach” is a more specific term than “personal coaching”. The figures bear closer scrutiny though.

If you want to buy your way to the top of Google for the keyword “personal coaching” you’ll need to spend £2.34 per click through to your website using Google Adwords. However in the same scenario for the keyword “personal fitness coach” you’ll only need to spend £1.04 per click. Usually, if the people that click on Google Ads are proven to spend money, the cost per click would be higher, so this seems like an anomoly.

There are a number of probable reasons for this:

  1. The figures provided by the Google keyword too and/or the Microsoft Commercial Intention tool are wrong. From experience the figures that the Google tool comes up with can be wildy innacurate so it’s sensible to trat them as an estimate.
  2. The personal fitness trainer niche in the UK isn’t that competitive online. I checked and it IS reasonably difficult to get a site onto page 1 of Google but not impossible.
  3. The fact that there is comparitively little traffic means that there is less competition among buyers of Google adwords.

All three are probably true but the point here is this – just because a keyword has volume traffic, does not neccesarily mean that you’d want to spend time and money getting ranked for it.

In the next article from web profit solutions we’ll look at exactly how to determine which keywords to target.