One of the things that will help you earn online cash is to understand how to add buying keywords to your internal and external SEO efforts. Simply put, a buying keyword is a term that people who’re interested in making a purchase search for versus information seeking keywords that are used by people who’re just searching for info.

The objective of buying keywords is to better target the buyers you’re seeking. It doesn’t matter if it’s for Adsense, affiliate offers, ecommerce or even offline sales, you want buyers who’re seeking to buy what you’re offering and you want them to visit your site in sufficient numbers for you to make money. The good thing is that many of these long tail buying keyword terms have weak competition and capturing a top position in Goggle search results isn’t too difficult.

The way a buying keyword term works is that you take a generic that people generally search for when they’re in a buying mood and pair it with what you’re selling. They can work well as you domain name as in cheapbluewidgets.com. They can be used as a site’s H1 and title header tag like “Cheap Blue Widgets” even if the domain name doesn’t match. You can even use them as anchor text on external links to your site.

Let’s look at a few of these terms and how they work or, at least, how they worked for me.

Free – Yes, this is a commonly searched term in conjunction with other terms but is it a buying keyword? It can be but you do have to pair it with something free and offer clear and compelling addon purchases for it to be effective. For example, you might offer a free sample of a product in hopes of getting an immediate purchase or collecting an email address for a mailing list where you would make additional offers or even a forced membership. This used to be big business in the ringtone area until there was a crackdown on the practice. Now many affiliate programs prohibit you from even using ‘free’ on your page.

Buy, Where To Buy – This is a good, generic, buying keyword. It’s often easy to get a domain name like wheretobuyproduct.com or even buyproduct.com.

Purchase – Not quite as good as some others because it doesn’t seem to get as many searches.

Shop, Where to Shop for – Like ‘buy’ this one is easy to find domains for with the ‘Where to for’ although productshop.com domains are often hard to find.

Cheap – I call this one Vic’s favorite since he uses it often as an example. Cheap and related words like cheaper and cheapest work really well.

Discount – This one is kind of a rich man’s cheap. It works good when you’re wanting to promote higher end products since it has less of a stigma than cheap. It’s also a good choice on domain names since it can work well as both discountbluewidgets.com or bluewidgetsdiscount.com.

Bargain – Also like cheap and discount although it isn’t used in searches quite as often.

Used, Second Hand, Refurbished – People using these terms are looking for a deal. This works quite well with eBay affiliate sites because that’s what eBay is known for.

Best ____ for the Money – I’ve tried this one out a few times and it seems to work well. It doesn’t get as many searches as some other terms but does well so far as conversions go.

Wholesale, Wholesaler – This is another one to use where you know you’re offering low prices. This one can be effective when paired with lot sales on eBay.

Also remember you can mix and match the terms as in “Cheap Used Blue Widgets” or “Where to Buy Wholesale Blue Widgets”. Another trick is to get brand and style specific. This helps narrow down the visitors to the core of serious potential buyers because they know what they’re looking for.

Do you have any suggestions on buying keywords or questions about them? Leave a comment if you do. And remember that knowing how to use buying keywords to build targeted traffic to your sites is essential to earning online cash.

Frank Carr December 4th, 2008 SEO

SEO
buying keywords, keywords, search terms