Using “Buyer Keywords” To Build A More Profitable Blog

When it comes to building your affiliate site, one of the most important parts will come down to creating great “monetized content”.

Put another way, it's about creating content that ranks well, converts well, and allows you to build up a more trustworthy blog for returning visitors.

We want to position our content right before the moment of purchase.

Our link drops the cookie and Amazon takes care of the rest.

Today, let's talk all about how we're going to get in front buyers “just in time.”

What Are “Buyer Keywords”?

The essence behind these keywords is that that someone is trying to find a solution to their buying decision. It's the commercial intent that we need to highlight here.

2 Types of Buyer Keywords

1.) Transactional: This is where people are ready to buy the product right now. It's keywords like “Walmart coupon” or “baby strollers on sale”

2.) Research: These ones have to do with product research generally. Most affiliate SEOs are targeting these because the person hasn't quite made up their mind yet but our content should help push them in the right direction (sometimes not for that product but to another we think is better.) Keywords like “best baby stroller 2019” or “newborn strollers X9000 review” would be examples research.

Sidenote: One caveat would be to stay away from “free” keywords. These aren't buyer keywords because they have no commercial intent. For example “free baby strollers near me” is very local and also not immediately monetizable for most of us.

Dealing In A Mobile-First Environment

One thing we should be mindful of is that we're constantly refining our sites to be more mobile friendly.

The crappy thing for us as affiliates is that we need to have our transactions credited via a cookie and most of the time people make purchases on the desktop but start their research on mobile.

That means they might visit our sites on their mobile phone but make their purchase back when they're on the desktop computer. Which we wouldn't get credit for.

A 2016 study of mobile vs desktop revenue. Mobile rev should be bigger now but I believe it's still majority from desktop.

That's a big problem and the trend will most likely continue this way. Which means we should consider how we'll attract people once again and cookie them on their desktop too. *Ads wink wink nudge nudge*

A Quick List of Keywords

Let's see some examples:

Best X – “best runners”
Best X for Y – “best runners for women”
X Review – “Nike X900 airwalker review”
X Coupon – “Nike X900 airwalker coupon”
X Discount code – “Nike X900 airwalker discount code”

The majority of us will be able to create content targeting the first 3 keywords but the last 2 are a bit tricky. Not impossible though since you may just need to reach out and ask for a discount code directly from the manufacturer.

Similar to how we were able to get a discount for KWFinder by chatting with them.

What Buyer Keywords Should You Go For?

The easiest thing for me to do is direct you to Alex's post on ROI keyword research. I won't explain it too deep since I really think you should read it completely, but here are the quick details:

It all begins with starting with the end in mind. By looking at how much commission you'd get from a sale and then working backwards from there. For example, if you think you can slide into the 3rd position for that keyword because of a “gap” in the SERPs then you can estimate how much traffic you'd get  based on normal click-through averages and also how many people would buy from there.

These are just estimates of your income from that keyword but it's a much better approach than looking purely at the keyword difficulty as your only guide.

How Do You Find These Keywords?

Since I gave you some examples of buyer keywords above, I think we can use those as a baseline for finding commercial keywords quickly.

1. Use The Filter In Your Keyword Tool

There are two ways in which you can use keyword tools. You could plug in a few seed keywords for your niche and do keyword research that way or you can plug in a competitor and steal their keywords.

You should probably do both to be honest.

I enjoy looking at competitors in the same DA/DR range and stealing their keywords. Sometimes the tools give you different keywords than what you'd find from just plugging in seed keywords.

After that, you can use the filter function and only look at “best” and “review” keywords.

2. Find What Keywords Advertisers Are Bidding For

SEMRush is an awesome tool for this. Find out what the big advertisers in your niche are and plug in their sites into SEMRush and see what kinds of keywords they're bidding for.

It's usually brand-oriented or ecommerce keywords but professional ad buyers know their numbers and if they are bidding on these keywords then you should consider reviewing them manually to see if they have any for you.

Sometimes you can find some golden nuggets here.

3. Amazon Product Keywords

We spoke about this in another post about keyword research here. But the gist is that you can go to Amazon and look at the titles of those products and see if there is any traffic for them inside of your keyword tool.

You really can't run out of keywords if you just go a little further than your competitors.

4. Google Suggestions

See what types of modifiers Google is suggesting to you either in the search bar while you type or at the bottom of the SERPs.

Hint: Download keywords everywhere for this. It'll be one of your favourite tools!

Creating Buyer Focused Content

I think that we all have unique ways of creating content but I'd like to go over some of the really important aspects of creating commercial content.

SEO Copywriting (SOOOO Important!)

How you structure your content is important but the power of words can really help you rank well plus provide higher conversion rates.

Amazon does a great job of converting visitors but as the content creator we should still be studying up on SEO copywriting constantly.

There's a saying that goes “If you leave your customers success to chance, you are giving up control over your own success.”

If we look at our role as an affiliate from that perspective, we shouldn't be leaving anything up to chance and that means our copywriting should  be outstanding.

For more information on SEO copywriting, I'd suggest checking out Brian Deans article.

Spice It Up With Some Videos

What's a good way to improve your dwell time? Well.. Videos!

Why not cater to all the senses and add a video explaining the products usefulness. This way you can again take back more control of your sites success.

You don't always have to create your own video either, and most likely you won't be either.

We've used videos to explain the how-to sections of our article and it's worked amazing!

Pros & Cons Lists

Always make your content to be as scannable as possible and then allow those who want to dig in further to do so. This is what pro and cons table are excellent for.

They let people get a general overview first and if they want to learn more then they can either read your blurb or click through and check out the up-to-date reviews on Amazon.

Either way, it works to your advantage to include a pros and cons list and it's really easy with the help of Amasuite's Review Analyzer.

Comparison Tables

Ok… If you don't have these right now on your posts then this is your first call-to-action!

Don't you want higher click-throughs to Amazon?

Help people make a decision easier by putting products side by side in a comparison chart and even go so far as segmenting each product for a specific person.

For example, if we assume you're working on a product roundup then one of them could be “best for small dogs” or “best for large breeds” etc.

This way you're helping people segment themselves into a category and this will improve your conversion rates.

Conclusion

At this point there are two tracks you can go down.

You can either go and create better content for your buyer keywords using the points above (which our content service will help you out with too.)

Or if you're brand new to affiliate sites, learn more about the other important content style…

Info content!

It's really quite simple, informational content is ideal for answering questions that aren't directly geared towards making a purchase.

It doesn't mean you can't monetize them, but for the most part, it's people looking for information only.

An example would be, “How to relieve back pain?”

Since you don't want to have your site completely filled with buyer content as Google doesn't really like that, the next logical question would be to determine what the ideal ratio is between the two types of content.

Well, the answer is here in this next article!

Do you have questions about buyer keywords though? Let us know in the comments!