The SEO industry is full of buzzwords that have helped to increase production within the industry. Phrases like “authority”, “trust rank” and “latent semantic indexing” might seem strange to outsiders but these are very familiar to SEO insiders.

All of these insider phrases are important and they’ll becoming increasingly important. In the past, peppering content with keywords worked but in the future, “commercial intent” will be the new phrase that drives SEO success.

In the paid research industry, buying keywords is nothing new. This is part of paid search advertising basics. However, the average SEO person pays this no mind because their attention is on traffic.
While high-traffic search terms are great, the SEO folks fail to understand that it’s better to gain 10k users to a website generated from the use of a commercial keyword than it is to gain 1 million visitors generated from an informational keyword.

Let’s look at a quick example: ‘Furniture’ as a keyword gets around 368k exact searches in a month’s time. It’s not one of the largest keywords but it’s a respectable sized keyword. This is why the average SEO person would use this keyword if they wanted to promote a furniture sales site.

The commercial phrase ‘buy furniture’ garners far less traffic. It might only garner a bit over 2k exact searches in a month. The average SEO marketer would skip over this phrase, because it doesn’t generate as much traffic as ‘furniture’ does.

However, let’s look at results. The informational phrase ‘furniture’ brings up informational content, such as wiki pages, a hobby site and a few ads. The commercial keyword phrase ‘buy furniture’ brings up furniture stores, paid advertising and a site for furniture wholesalers.

The facts are clear: Commercial keywords, even if they garner far less traffic, are more effective for your SEO marketing purposes. This is true even if other keywords garner more traffic.

Therefore, it can be said that traffic isn’t everything. SEO folks are going to be forced to turn their attention towards the quality of their keywords, with less of a focus on the traffic that their keyword generates. As a matter of fact, the software company WordStream states that up to two thirds of commercial keyword clicks online lead to paid search advertising.

So, if you’re ready to start focusing on commercial keywords, here’s what you need to do. You can start out by using Google’s keyword selection tool. It was designed for Adwords marketers. It will give you data on the keyword you have in mind to use. It’s not the complete authority you might be looking for but it can offer you a great view of what type of keywords are of higher value, such as keywords that advertisers are spending money on.

Google has already cracked down on keyword stuffing, easy linking, etc. Those days are over. If you are ready to accept this fact, then it should be easy for you to adapt to low-traffic, “buying keywords”. These are the type of keywords that are going to garner you results with fewer disadvantages while you’re running your SEO marketing campaign.