Finding Transactional Keywords

Aug 3, 2010 by

I don’t think to many people call “converting keywords” the term “transactional keywords”, I got the term from James. But a transactional keyword is one that will create a sale/lead for you on your website. Terms like “buy red shoes”, “buy shoes in Idaho falls”, “shoes for sale” are all transactional keywords. Keywords like “shoes”. “shoe info”, “what are shoes”, etc are not transactional keywords because they most likely will not get you a sale or lead.

What I will be going over below;

1. What are transactional keywords
2. Using Google external tool to find keywords
3. Using “Searches related to” to find keywords
4. Using your stats to find converting keywords
5. Check competitors “keywords meta tag”
6. Basics to see how hard a term is to rank for

What are transactional keywords
I always add each one of my keywords into Google search and research each keyword that I market and/or spend monies on. You should look into each particular keyword you are promoting with and make sure that the keyword will get you a sale or lead and not just normal traffic were people are just browsing around. If you do not know the difference between a “transactional keyword” and a “normal keyword” then just ask yourself what you would be typing into Google search to buy a certain product.

Using Google external tool to find keywords
I never ever use any paid tools (or anything special) to research my keywords. I always use adwords external tool to find new keywords after doing my main keyword research. Why do I use the external tool? Hell if I know I have always used it. If you have never played around with the adwords tool then you should play around with it for a little while, it works great when researching keywords.

When I research a keyword in the Google tool I always enter a few keywords into the tool and then take a look at what the tools produces. I never look at the global or monthly info because that info is always wrong (at least when I research it is). I don’t bother to much to the competition info much either. I mostly use the adwords tool to find new keywords that I am researching. After I enter a few main keywords into the tool I will then see what the tool produces and then grab a few more keywords that seem to convert.

Using the adwords tool I would gather a list of keywords in notepad, then I would research each keyword in Google to see how much competition there is, how much work it will take, is it a transactional keyword, and I also see if I can find any new keywords that are similar.

Using “Searches related to” to find keywords
When doing keyword research you will notice that at the bottom of some Google search pages you will see a thing that says “Related searches” or “Searches related to”, here is a link to an example search. I use that to help find even more keywords. Most of the time the Google external tool will tell you the keywords first, but sometimes the adwords tool misses some that the “related search” thing doesn’t. Always check out the related searches when doing your research.

Using your stats to find converting keywords
You should always use a stats program on all of your websites. I personally use 3 programs on average; Google Analytics, GetClicky.com, and clicktale.com. I find a lot of great keywords using stats programs, make sure look at your stats often and keep tweaking your list of targeted keywords. Most of the time you will find a good amount of targeted keywords that people use to find the product your selling, make sure your on the look out for these new keywords so you can target them.

Below I have a screen shot of the stats from my survivormanfans.com website. I targeted the right keywords which include “buy survivorman dvds”, “survivorman dvds”, “les stroud dvds”, etc. But if you notice there are some odd keywords in there that looks like they convert, they are “les stroud vanishing world” (which is his new show I just learned of), “les stroud survival kit” (these things might sell pretty good, I never researched it at all) and “les stroud off the grid”. Most of these keywords dont come up when using the google tool and the “related search” thing, so be sure to always keep looking at your stats to find new keywords to target.

Check competitors “keywords meta tag”
Let me show you a little trick I learned back in NAM. Your competitors have done the work to find there keywords for these website, and most websites place there important keywords in there META tags (the code above the body tag for you non-html people). I go to my competitors and check out there META keywords to make sure I am not missing anything. Dont rely fully on this method, but its a good method to pick up a few keywords you might have missed that your competition is using.

You can also check out your competitions website to see how they seo’ed there website. Be on the lookout for any new keywords you might have missed. Take a look at the links in the sidebar and footer, most of the time when people make site wide links on a keyword then that means that the keyword is pretty important. Also be sure to check out the title tag, description meta tag, and of course the keyword meta tag.

Basics to see how hard a term is to rank for
I can look at a search term and tell you if it will be hard to rank or not. I can do that without using any tools. The process is actually simple, but it take a lot of failure to know exactly what keywords to target for. Some of what I look for is below;

1. Check to see what types of websites are being displayed
2. Check to see if the web page is the main directory or a sub. example: domain.com or domain.com/buy-product
3. Check adwords competition
4. Check backlinks on websites

There are more stuff you can do for researching, but Im just explaining the basics.

1. Check to see what types of websites are being displayed
Ok the very fist thing you will want to look at is the types of websites being displayed on the search result. I can tell you now if you see amazon.com, nexttag.com, overstock.com, buy.com, wikipedia.com, walmart.com, etc (shopping type websites with lots of SEO weight and lots of products/pages/content). Those types of websites actually have a good amount of weight behind them, so they rank for long tailed keywords pretty easily, however they never do seo work for there own products (well some of the products but they cant do them all) so most of the time it is easy to rank a targeted site for the keywords. If i see any of the sites mentioned above then I would target that keyword, because it would be pretty easy for me.

Example terms;
Below are some example terms that have lots of the types of sites above;
1. buy white gloves
2. firewood for sale in michigan
3. blue baby cribs

2. Check to see if the webpage is the main directory or a sub. example: domain.com or domain.com/buy-product
Type in “pond pumps” in Google What do you see? Then type in “pond pumps with no filter“. Notice that the first keyword had mostly domain.com type of websites, and the second keyword had domain.com/something-random. Well the second keyword is a transactional keyword (a keyword that someone will type in when looking for pond pumps) and doesn’t have that much completion. The reason for that is because most of the domains for that term have UN-related content.

So searches that have a lot of random stuff pop up are usually easier to rank for compared to search terms that contain mostly domain.com type urls. The reason is because when most companies do there link building they target there main website instead of the sub-pages for the keyword they are going after. With the example terms above it would probably take 3-4k and 1 year to rank for “pond pumps”, but it would cost less then 50$ and less then a week to rank for the “pond pumps with no filter”. You can tell how easy a term is to rank by looking at the urls, if they are mostly domain.com urls then the keyword will be harder to rank then terms like keyword.com/blog-post-about-keyword

3. Check adwords competition
Always check out the current adwords completion for any keyword you are going after. I mostly do adwords first and then move onto SEO, but if you are checking to see how hard or easy a term is to rank for then you can look to see how much adwords completion there is. And if the adwords advertisers are mostly big name company like amazon.com, walmart.com, buy.com, etc then that means that the adwords completion is easy, those company dont spend to much on adwords for certain keywords, they mostly throw as many keywords as they can out there. I have always found that out bidding those types of sites are pretty easy. So if the adwords completion is pretty easy, then the SEO work might be easy as well.

4. Check backlinks on websites
As far as the basics go, knowing how many keywords your website has and how many your competition is very very very important. I use nothing else but yahoo.com to check backlinks.

To check your backlinks…

- go yahoo.com
- type in “link:yourwebsite.com”
- push enter silly
- select “except from this domain”
- select “entire site”

After you do that you will then see how many backlinks are pointing to your website. You select those special options so that the thing will tell you how many links your entire website has, and it also disregards links on your own website. Make sure you select those 2 results so you have an accurate number.

I hope this helps when finding transactional keywords, if you have any questions be sure to ask in the blog comments