Traffic with buyer-intent > Monthly website visitors
This is one of the most crucial concepts if you're doing SEO.
Yet every week, I have conversations and see examples where people overlook this.
It's such a common oversight that SEO agencies make the same mistake.
They chase traffic for the sake of traffic instead of asking themselves: does this traffic have buyer intent?
It's especially important if you're trying to sell leads or featured listings with directories.
Regardless of the niche you're building in, your goal isn't just getting high monthly traffic volume.
What matters is getting the right kind of traffic.
My friends business website had GREAT SEO...or did it?
I have a friend named Ashley who is a high-end personal stylist.
She charges $4000+/month for personal wardrobe styling and she asked me for an SEO consulting session one day.
When I started auditing her website, I noticed it was getting 2,000 monthly visitors.
Nice, right? Especially for a high-end service.
Yet she complained that she wasn’t getting any leads.
When I looked deeper, it was clear why. Almost all of her traffic came from blog posts about what celebrities wore at award shows ( think "What Ryan Gostling wore to the Grammys").
She had just hired an SEO agency a few months back and they wrote articles purely around high search-volume keywords.
But those visitors weren’t her buyers. They were just readers.
My advice to her?
Figure out what someone searching for a high-end personal stylist is actually typing into Google, then build your entire SEO strategy around serving those visitors.
Without targeting the right keywords, paying for SEO will still make monetization a struggle.
A simple way to check if a keyword has buyer-intent
No one has the ability to read minds and there's no way to guarantee that 100% of the searchers behind a keyword have buyer-intent.
But you can use SEO tools to dig up clues.
Some keywords are super obvious buyer-intent keywords, just from the sound of it.
"Gyms with daycare near me" or "Motels in Bend Oregon" are examples of keywords with clear search intent.
But if you want to confirm whether you're actually targeting the right keywords, you can use a tool like ahrefs (or keysearch, SEMrush, and any other SEO tool) and look up a local business website.
First, look up your keyword on Google.
Ignore Reddit, large directories like Yelp and listicles like these:
Instead, find an actual local business that is offering the service you want to sell featured listings to, like this:
The fact that Google is ranking a real local business for this keyword means Google believes people searching are actually looking to buy that service
From here, you can copy and paste the local business website into ahref's site explorer, then head to "Organic keywords."
And boom.
You can see:
- The types of keywords that a local business offering real services is ranking for
- Synonyms or alternative keywords that share similar buyer-intent
- ahref's commercial intent tag (which indicates when a user is comparing products or services before making a purchase)
Choose the right target keywords early & let the rest fall into place
Finding your niche's buyer-intent keywords is one of the first things anyone building a directory should do as early into their project as possible.
Not because I said so. No no no.
But because the keyword you build your directory around will bring clarity to what you should do next.
It informs the domain you buy, the data enrichment you include on your listings and even the way your website pages are structured.
I'm not saying everything magically falls into place.
But it lets you start on the right path to guide a specific person through their decision-making process.
This is what gets people to fill out a lead magnet ("Get an estimate" or "Book a call").
If you start getting lead form submissions then congratulations.
You now own the only thing that matters to a local business - inbound leads.
Now you can start selling them.
Best,
Frey
