Do It Yourself Series (Part 3)
On Line Commercial Intent (OCI) is a useful metric for gaining insights on what SEO terms searchers use when they are ready to purchase. That can be very powerful information.
So we’ve identified 4 keyword phrases with good relevancy and highest volume.
They are:
House painter 60,500
Home painter 22,200
House Painting 201,000
Painting Contractors 90,500
Note: upper case and lower case letters are viewed as the same on search engines. You will get the same results regardless of which is used.
As the business owner you may already have some feelings on these terms. But lets go through the process, you may find some surprises.
Microsoft adlabs OCI Tool
There is an online tool to help measure what is called Online Commercial Intent (OCI) from Microsoft adlabs.
Here’s the link: http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention
Me geek side thinks it very cool. But from a practical stand point I will over ride any results that tend to go against common sense.
Put your keywords in, select Query and Go. You will get a probability of commercial intent…how likely a searcher using this keyword phrase is looking to buy. “house painter” gets 57% and “home painter” get 99%. Big difference.
So here are our results for the 4 phrases:
House painter 57%
Home painter 99%
House Painting 61% non-commercial
Painting Contractors 59% non-commercial
Non-commercial means that the searcher using the phrase is more likely not intend on make a purchase now. My guess is that “house painting” is a “how to/DIY” keyword. But “painting contractor” non-commercial intent results is a bit confusing. So let’s dig a little deeper. Let’s try “painting contactor Philadelphia”
“painting contactor Philadelphia” has an OCI of 87%. Much better. But this may be a term that is better for commercial painters and less relevant for residential house painters.
This is where the business owners experience comes in.
Geo modifiers change the OCI. If we enter “house painter Philadelphia” the probability goes up to 96%. That makes sense, right? People who enter a town or city in their search are most likely looking for someone to perform the service. Geo Modifiers play a big role in local SEO. For some businesses the number of geo modifiers out weighs the number of core keywords.
So we are still left with “house painter” and “home painter”. They have a large difference in search volume and in there OCI metric. And there seems to be an inverse relationship. How to choose?
Combining Search Volume and OCI Information
Well you may want to just promote for both but if you had to choose you could do a little math to help the process. You can multiply the search volume by the OCI to get a keyword value score.
OCI Volume Keyword Value Score
House painter 57% 60,500 34,485
Home painter 99% 22,200 19,998
House painter still wins out by quite a bit. My vote for most valuable keyword goes to “house painter”. That doesn’t mean that “home painter” should not be used. But it does mean that you can probably get more business from good search rankings for “house painter” that for “home painter”. And that’s the bottom line right?
The keyword value score can also be used to make PPC bidding decisions. Jack up your bids on the valuable keywords and lower your bids on the less valuable to generate more sales and be more efficient. But that’s for another post.
Next installment - Add Geo Modifiers



