How to Find BUYER Intent Keywords (5 Advanced Tactics)
Video Transcript
(00:00) hey everyone robbie richards here in this video i’m going to show you five quick ways you can find loads of buyer intent keywords for your business and i’ll be using a series of working examples just to show you how these tactics can be immediately applied to pretty much any type of website whether you’re working with a local business or an affiliate site all the way through to an e-commerce store or even sas companies now if you’re new to the channel make sure you hit the subscribe button below here to get notified when i publish any
(00:24) new tutorials and all the references and links mentioned in this video will be in the description below so let’s jump in [Music] okay i’m going to be using semrush to execute each of the tactics in this video if you don’t have an account you can just grab a free 30-day trial using the link in the description below the video okay so the first tactic we’re going to talk about here is subfolder analysis and this is a really powerful tactic that’s going to help you focus your entire keyword research process on only the most valuable keyword
(00:54) opportunities for your business or more specifically your site monetization model and illustrate this tactic let’s just pretend that for starters we’re a competitor of this website here beard brand which is an ecommerce store that sells a bunch of different beard products ecommerce stores are usually going to prioritize more bottom of the funnel product related keywords since they can monetize those the quickest and they have much higher buyer intent right so most ecommerce stores are going to house these products though in some sort of
(01:22) product or category subfolder so if i just hover over a beard here and come in to say beard oil i can immediately see that beard brand is housing all of its products inside this conveniently this product subfolder so what i need to do now is i need to grab this url copy it and then head back over into semrush and go to the seo toolkit organic research report and then what i want to do is drop in that url including the subfolder and then select subfolder from the drop down and then click search and then it’s going to
(01:51) populate a report you want to navigate to the positions tab here and now you’re going to see a list of all the keywords that all the pages in this product subfolder are ranking for inside the top 100 search results so i can see all of the products inside this product subfolder they’re ranking for about 1100 different keywords and i can see all the keywords here along with server features their position traffic to the page search volume and even the urls and a bunch of other metrics in here you can even manage the columns if you want
(02:20) to filter in and out different metrics now this is a lot of data here obviously so generally what i like to do when i’m running through this subfolder analysis process is only perform it on sites that have comparable domain authority because if they’re able to rank for these keywords the thought process here is if i have comparable domain authority to them then my site can probably also rank two all else equal considering like links and content on the page so once i’m in here the next thing i do is i apply some additional
(02:46) filters just to clean up the data a little bit more the first one i like to do is just look at all the keywords that my competitors are ranking in the top 10 search results click apply and now i’ve trimmed this down to 162 keywords the next one i’ll do is i’ll set a volume filter and this is going to vary a little bit depending on how many keywords you have left and the type of niche you’re in sometimes you can set these minimum thresholds a lot higher or lower depending on the industry you’re in but for these guys i might just say
(03:11) hey let’s go for a minimum search volume of 40. and now i’m down to 100 different keywords so what i’ll do is add a couple more advanced filters in here so i’m going to go i want to include only keywords where there is a word count greater than 2 so i can go for slightly longer tail which tend to be a little less competitive and then i also want to exclude any branded keywords from my results as well so i’ll exclude beardbrand here and then i’ll apply that filter and now i’m left with 57 keywords that are all
(03:39) product related that i can potentially target with a new product page or even product category page on my website and we can identify what types of pages we need by looking at the urls here but you can see i’ve got things like beard styling balm beard grooming kits beard care kits round beard brushes and i can see the organic traffic to here that can help me prioritize even a little bit further so all you need to do is just scan down the list here and just check the plus icon and that’s going to add it to the keyword
(04:04) list that you have up here or if you want to do it in bulk you can just select here and then come up and add them to the keyword list that you’ve created inside of semrush now this same strategy can be applied to affiliate websites as well in pretty much any type of business so for example if i’m running an affiliate website that sells or promotes coffee products all i do is come over to a site like wirecutter or any other industry site and come to a relevant category on their website so i can see under kitchen
(04:28) and dining they’ve got this coffee category i already know that wirecutter writes a ton of reviews just from some preliminary research if i come in here i can immediately see all this best of type content so best coffee grinder best coffee makers so if i click on one of these links i can see immediately that they’re housed inside of this reviews subfolder so similar to what we just did with the beer brand example we’ll just come back into semrush come to the seo toolkit organic research report and this time we’ll drop in the full url
(04:56) string with the review subfolder select subfolder from the drop down again and then come into the positions report and now i can go through and filter down this list now i think there are over like a million keywords when i initially entered this in so what i did is i only want to see all of the review terms that y cutter in this case are ranking in the top ten minimum search volume of a hundred in this case and then i added in a few more advanced filters so i went word count greater than two and then because i’m only interested in
(05:25) the coffee related review posts inside that reviews subfolder i added in the term best as a keyword modifier as well as coffee and then i excluded wirecutter as a brand term and this left me with 140 keywords that i could potentially write affiliate based content around for my coffee or my fake coffee website right you can see down here if i scroll best ways to pour best coffee maker for coffee snobs interesting if i scroll down a little bit further though you can see best cheap coffee maker best rated coffee
(05:57) pots best coffee for a drip coffee maker best home coffee maker best conical bur coffee grinder so these are all terms i never would have really thought of but could be really great terms to write a review post around for my affiliate site and again the whole goal here is to really just use this subfolder analysis process so you can prioritize and only focus in on the most valuable topics for your business or site monetization model so for the example of beard brand we looked at product related keywords and for our fake coffee affiliate site
(06:26) we focused on the reviews folder because we found all these best of type list review posts which we’re going to be able to monetize much easier for that type of site okay for this second tactic we’re going to be looking at performing subfolder gap analysis and basically we want to use the same subfolder approach but to identify content gaps for our business so an example here is phenomenon law they’re personally i’m not affiliated with any other sites uh i’m mentioning here but just using them as examples we see fellamanlaw.com personal injury
(06:55) attorney servicing uh pennsylvania in this case so if i’m looking at their site they already have a bunch of content and they’ve obviously done some keyword research and they’re probably working with an seo agency here but if i wanted to find some additional service area keywords that i could potentially target that i may not have thought of already what i would do is just go and take one of their top ranking competitors in the market so dolman law is a site that i came across they’re crushing it they’re servicing bunch of
(07:18) locations they’ve got tons of service areas across all these locations so i might want to look at them right and semrush makes it extremely easy to identify these subfolder content gaps so i can see that dolman law in this case if i hover over i can see that pretty much all of their different services are housed inside inside of this legal services subfolder so what i’ll do is i’ll just copy that subfolder head over here into the semrush seo toolkit come to the keyword gap report i would enter my site so you can see you so enter your domain
(07:49) here in this case fellowmanlaw.com if that was my my business but it obviously isn’t but just as the example and then i would drop in the subfolder here for dolman law with the legal services and in this case i want to select subfolder because i’m only interested in looking at keywords inside of that and then here i’ll click this little link and i want to make sure i’ve got organic keywords selected for both and this report is now going to show me all of the keywords that dolman law is ranking for within their legal services
(08:20) subfolder so again high value keyword targets they’re service based keywords for this local business that fellman law is not ranking for at all now i scroll down here and what i want to do too is i want to say i want to set a position filter so you’ve got an advanced filtering option here in semrush where i say i’m only interested in the keywords where my competitors in this case dolmen law their subfolder is ranking in the top 20 positions you can do top 10 as well and then come down and then select missing because we’re interested
(08:51) in all the keywords or service based keywords that dolman law is ranking for that fellowman law is not and i can see here right away i have 555 keywords that dolman law is ranking for with their legal services subfolder that the entire domain felon law is not ranking for at all and i can scroll down here and if i was filming law i would just look for any service or practice level keywords that i’m currently not targeting on my site that i do service and i would add those to my list just by pressing the plus icon and
(09:21) these could be great new service based keywords to go after on my site so this is a great way where you can pair the subfolder analysis with a content gap approach here inside semrush to quickly find really high value keyword targets okay so the third tactic we want to look at is using investigational keyword modifiers to quickly identify high intent keyword opportunities and when i talk about investigational modifiers i’m talking about any keywords where you have a modifier in the query like best top tools software for anything that would
(09:54) indicate that somebody is actively researching like the best type of tool or software or solution for a specific persona or industry as these people are much closer to the point of conversion and again this can work really well for affiliate sites uh sas companies uh a lot of different business types okay so for our first example let’s just pretend you’re a sas company right like core dna here they offer a bunch of different solutions some of which are related to e-commerce content management a bunch of different things in here
(10:24) right so if this company wants to target the middle of the funnel when their target persona is actively researching available solutions or comparing specific products all you need to do is come over to semrush in the seo toolkit come to the keyword magic tool here and then what you want to do is just enter in any keywords or topics that are related to your products or features or even blog topics that you might want to write about anything related to your industry too you can drop those keywords in here and then come down to the includes and
(10:52) select any keywords and then we drop in those modifiers like best top software tools and platform and now we get a list of all of the topics that have investigational intent that are around your product features uh or your platform or any blog topics or industry terms so we’ve got things like this immediately where we’ve surfaced opportunities like best free e-commerce platform best ecommerce platform for small businesses best b2b e-commerce platform best e-commerce platform or criteria for the best ecommerce platform
(11:25) so things to consider when purchasing there’s a bunch of different terms in here best enterprise e-commerce platform these could all be great solution-based keywords for this sas business and the cool thing here too here in semrush is you can actually filter directly into the different groups as well they organize them by topical groups so if you’ve got a large keyword set to work through you can quickly drill in and look for those modifiers here in this list too just to trim it down a little bit further and real quick just
(11:53) as an example here too you can see for a fourth estate coffee this is a website where they put out a bunch of different content around like the best coffee products and ways to make coffee and a lot of different things like that it’s an affiliate website so if i come over and i drop them into the organic research report here in the seo toolkit look at their entire domain i can use the same sort of keyword modifier filtering on all the keywords they’re ranking for too as well so i can look at the ones that are in the top 10 for
(12:20) minimum search volume of 100 and then i can come in and say the keyword has to contain the modifier best and have more than two terms so we want to go a little bit more longer tail and immediately i start to identify some great affiliate terms like best nespresso machine best coffee thermos best nespresso pods and just bunch of different terms in here that they could write these best of type list posts around and monetize for their affiliate website okay and now for this fourth tactic we’re going to be talking about
(12:47) comparative keyword modifiers so it’s very similar to the last one we just talked about but we’re going to be approaching it a little bit differently from the sense that we now enter in our top competitors and then filter terms by things such as versus comparison alternatives competitors things like that to quickly find opportunities to insert your products or features or services as an alternative option for people when they’re actively looking for something different or comparing products in a specific industry so coming back to
(13:17) our example here of core dna one of their top competitors is magento so all they would need to do is come back into the seo toolkit keyword magic tool drop in the term magento for their competitor and then they come in and they say include any keywords or any queries that contain any of these keywords so alternatives competitors versus things that would indicate that someone is actively looking for a different option or comparing solutions right before the point of conversion and so i would apply those filters and now
(13:48) immediately i’m left with about 1500 keywords but i can see there’s some great ones in here so like magento the shopify is something people search a lot magento versus woocommerce magento vs wordpress magento alternatives magento competitors all these keywords have over 100 monthly searches and i scroll down there’s just tons of these that they could write content around and you can even come down here and you can see where there’s keywords where it’s like magento versus wordpress versus drupal so you know you’re converting it’s
(14:15) telling you you need to compare up to three products in order to go after that term and now we come down magento go i’m not sure what that is but verse community verse enterprise that might be some sort of like solution based comparison so just loads of different keywords in here and you can imagine if you repeat this for five or ten competitors you can end up with dozens of different really good mid funnel comparative keyword topics to go after that have a lot of intent behind them now this same strategy can be
(14:40) applied to affiliate websites as well and a lot of other different business types so for example my blog where i write about a lot of different seo topics uh such as link building keyword research traffic analysis local seo rank like all these different seo subtopics and i monetize through affiliate revenue right so what i would do is i would look for opportunities where what are the competing products to the products that i’m currently an affiliate for so an example of this is the semrush traffic analytics tool which allows you
(15:10) to analyze any websites traffic across all the different channels and all the different devices so think organic traffic paid traffic referral social direct traffic across mobile and desktop devices and you can even connect it and look at estimates around google analytics metrics like bounce rate time on page page per session etc so it’s a very valuable tool one of their top competitors is similar web so what i would do is i’ll just drop in similar web here and then just like i did with the other example i would come in and i would look
(15:40) for any keywords where there are terms like verses alternatives and competitors because again these people are actively looking for different options to similar web and it gives me a good op opportunity to promote semrush which is a product i use use every day but i’m also an affiliate for and presented as a potential option or a different solution outside of uh similar web so if i drop that in i can see here immediately similar web competitors similar web alternatives so these both have good search volume behind them even
(16:09) similar webverse semrush so what i would do is i would go ahead and create an article targeting the term similar web alternatives which i did right here you can see i’ve got six of the best similar web alternatives obviously semrush to me is one of the top options here and then i go through and just talk about all the different ways you can analyze traffic using the traffic analytics tool and i even include a template here that walks people through how step by step how to analyze the traffic and you can see over the last few months
(16:40) i’ve managed to move this keyword up into the i’ve managed to move this post sorry up into the number one position for similar web alternatives and similar web competitors and it now drives you know a few hundred organic visits to my site each month so i can repeat this for all the competing products the ones that i’m an affiliate for and the final tactic you can use here to surface buyer intent keywords is a ppc organic gap analysis and semrush’s keyword gap tool makes this incredibly easy to do so you can see here i’ve got traffic
(17:09) safety store and traffic safety warehouse again i’m not affiliated with either of these websites just for a practical demonstration but let’s just say i’m traffic safety store and i want to find out all of the keywords that my competitor traffic safety warehouse is bidding on in paid search that i’m currently not ranking for on inorganic so they’ve got the idea here is that if traffic safety warehouse is bidding on these as an e-commerce store they’re probably going to have a high degree of buying intent right
(17:37) so if they’re targeting those and i’m not ranking for them organically they could present not only an opportunity for me to go and pay for those keywords but also to start building out new product pages and categories on my site to go after those high intent terms so i simply just add those in and what i need to do is make sure i’ve got for traffic safety store organic keywords selected and then paid keywords for my competitor because again i want to find out all the keywords they’re bidding on that i’m not ranking for organically now
(18:06) adding another compe filter here you’ve got a bunch of different options but for now i’m just going to include volume greater than 100 then i’ll come down and i’ll click this missing tab again and now i can see all the keywords they’re bidding on that i’m not ranking for in organic search and for the traffic safety store there’s a bunch of different keywords they could build out new categories around things like reflective tape solar led lights driveway markers reflective spay pranks so there’s all these all these uh subtopics here and you can
(18:33) see they’ve got tons of volume behind them so these could be good buyer intent keywords to go after two and again you can apply this not only for e-commerce stores sas companies local businesses anywhere where you have competitors that are bidding on keywords that you might want to also go after organically okay so those are five actionable ways you can quickly surface buyer keywords for your business if you enjoyed the tutorial please hit the like button subscribe to the channel and to get notified when i publish my next tutorial
(19:00) and remember if you don’t have a semrush account you do want to give it a test drive you can just grab the 30 day free trial link in the description below the video so i’ll see you in the next one
Summary
In this video, Robbie Richards dives into five effective methods for uncovering high buyer intent keywords using Semrush. This guide is packed with practical strategies designed for businesses of all kinds—whether you’re managing an e-commerce site, a local business, SaaS, or an affiliate site. Robbie demonstrates each tactic through examples and explains how these approaches can be used across different industries to zero in on valuable keywords with high conversion potential. From subfolder analysis to keyword gap analysis, these methods are tailored to help businesses focus on keywords most likely to attract engaged, ready-to-convert users.
Key Takeaways
Robbie kicks things off with subfolder analysis—using competitors’ subfolders to identify high-value keywords within specific product categories, which is ideal for e-commerce sites. He then shifts to subfolder gap analysis, where he shows how to spot keyword gaps by comparing competitor subfolders. The third approach, investigational keyword modifiers, leverages search phrases like “best” and “top” to uncover product comparison keywords ideal for affiliate and SaaS companies. Next is the comparative keyword modifier strategy, which targets terms like “versus” and “alternatives” to position a product alongside competitors, a key move for SaaS and affiliate marketers. The final tactic, PPC-organic gap analysis, helps discover high-buying intent keywords by analyzing competitor-paid keywords that your site doesn’t rank for organically.
Conclusion
These five strategies allow businesses to surface valuable, intent-driven keywords, optimize their content, and maximize conversion opportunities. By applying these approaches, you can tap into high-interest keywords that align with your business model and attract users at various stages of the buying journey. This video is an essential watch for anyone looking to strengthen their keyword research process and drive targeted traffic effectively.