SEO Help on Keywords Psychology

What customer response will be triggered by your keywords?

This post is not so much about choosing the right keyword, but rather understanding what will be the psychological pattern of the people who use given keywords. Through this understanding, you’ll be able to know which keyword you should use for your SEO for each specific page based on your intended visitor reaction to your content.

Statistics shows that people buying on internet go to three different keywords research processes:

* Keywords for browsing.
* Keywords for comparing.
* Keywords for buying.

There are many reasons why people go through these processes, including the fact that most of the people don’t actually know how to make a proper research for what they want.

They will usually start with a general term about their search. This is usually a 1-2 words keyword term. Just consider someone planning for his vacation and looking for flight tickets. The keyword term he may type could be something like “flight ticket”.

Obviously, this is a very generic term and at this point, the customer is not looking to buy anything yet, he’s just browsing for more information, this is why we call this type “keywords for browsing”. If you happened to optimize your page for this term, understand clearly that your visitor is browsing and will not buy whatever you have on this page at this time.

That person could be looking for anything related to flight tickets, it could be buying, it could be surveying price or destination, it could also just be general information regarding flight tickets. Even broader term would be just “ticket”. There we wouldn’t even know if it’s a bus ticket, train ticket, plain ticket, ferry ticket or any other kind of ticket.

Not only such broad terms are not targeted at all and don’t convert well, they are also extremely competitive and basically a waste of time to optimize.

After browsing a few website, that person will suddenly start to understand better the information given on internet and is looking for advice or more information to confirm their idea. He will then start to refine its keyword research using longer keyword terms of 2-4 words. At this point of time, he would search for terms like “flight ticket to Thailand”.

We are no longer talking about a broad match. What the person is looking is much clearer. We know it’s a flight ticket and we have a destination. Obviously, our visitor has a clearer idea of what he’s looking for, and so do we. Just by the keyword term, I can tell that this person wants to go to Thailand by air, but hasn’t yet decided on an airline. The best information I can supply my visitor on this page is exactly what they are looking for. In this case, it’s a list of all the airline companies that fly to Thailand, as well as their flight schedule.

This is why we call these terms “keywords for comparing”. The visitor may not yet be ready to buy, but if I’m able to supply sufficient quality information, I may be able to lead him there.

Lastly, the person knows exactly what he’s looking for. The keyword term will be longer (what we usually call “long tail keywords”), often of 4 words or more like “thai airways flight ticket from Paris to Bangkok”.

At this point of time, the mind of the visitor is set. If you can provide what the person is looking for, you will close the sale. This is why we call this “keywords for buying”.

If you provide the person with flight ticket information to Hong Kong or from another airline that Thai Airways, you will lose the sale. However, if you provide exactly what the person is looking for, the sale is yours!

Note that if you want to increase your conversion rate, make sure that you encourage your visitor to take action on this kind of page; don’t just provide passive information, there must be a call to action.

Understanding the psychology behind the keywords, you should make sure that you optimize your page for the right keywords, and that you provide the correct content too in order to get the expected action from your visitors.

To your success!