Target buyer-intent keywords, not just big ones

Buyer-intent keywords, the AI-native way

The Keyword research note (previous step) hands you a long list. This note is how you choose from it: AI tags every keyword's intent in one pass, and your margin numbers decide the rest. A term with 500 buying-intent searches beats one with 50,000 browsers.

The intent ladder

Every query sits on a ladder — the higher the rung, the closer to the wallet. For a yoga-mat store:

Modifier cheat-sheet: how / what / why = informational; best / vs / review / for [use-case] = commercial; buy / price / sale / exact model or size = transactional. Let blog posts own the top of the funnel; let product and collection pages own the bottom.

Fastest path: one prompt, end to end

Paste your keyword list into ChatGPT or Claude with this:

You are an SEO strategist for an ecommerce store.
Store sells: [your products in one sentence]
Keyword list: [paste keywords, one per line, with volume and difficulty if you have them]

Do this and return ONE markdown table:
1. Label each keyword's intent: Informational, Commercial, or Transactional. Use the modifiers (how/what/why = informational; best/vs/review = commercial; buy/price/sale/exact model = transactional) plus common sense.
2. Flag every buyer term (Commercial or Transactional) with a star.
3. For each buyer term, name the product or collection in my store it would sell, and the page type it belongs on (product, collection, comparison, blog).
4. If a keyword has no volume number, leave the Volume column blank. Do not guess or estimate any number — every figure must come from a tool you opened or a source you can cite next to it. If you can browse, read real volumes from Google Keyword Planner (ads.google.com) or the Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator (ahrefs.com/keyword-generator); if you cannot browse, leave Volume blank and tell me to fill it from one of those tools.
5. Sort the table: Transactional first, then Commercial, then Informational.

Columns: Keyword | Intent | Buyer? | Volume | Sells which product | Page type

Or re-score your list in 5 steps

1. Start from the sheet you built in Keyword research — or export the last 12 months of queries from Google Search Console → Performance.
2. Let AI tag intent. Paste the whole list: "Label each keyword Informational, Commercial or Transactional and flag the buyer terms." Spot-check 10 by hand; fix any wrong ones.
3. Add margin. For each buyer term, note which product it sells and that product's gross margin. Same volume, very different value: a term selling a 70%-margin product beats one selling a 20%-margin product.
4. Score. Intent weight (Transactional 3, Commercial 2, Informational 1) × gross margin %. Volume only breaks ties.
5. Re-rank and map. The top 10 each get a page: transactional → product or collection page, commercial → comparison page, informational → blog post. Done = the re-ranked sheet with a page named next to each of the top 10.

Worked example — example math, your numbers will differ

Say four yoga-mat terms come out like this (volumes are placeholders — pull real ones from Keyword Planner):

The head term has 180x the volume of the buyer term, yet scores a quarter of it — your first page slots go to the 500-volume buyer term. Chase revenue, not impressions.

Re-score quarterly, right after you re-run keyword research.