Break Down Head Terms Into Buying Phrases

Full transcript

1,092 words · script draft, under review.

Intro

You find a keyword with huge search volume. It fits your product perfectly. Say you sell espresso machines, and the word "espresso" has a hundred thousand searches a month.

So you build a page for it. It even starts to rank. And almost nobody buys.

Because most people who type "espresso" aren't shopping. They want to know what it is, how to make one, how much caffeine it has, or where the nearest café is. The volume is real. It's just not your volume.

In this episode I'll show you how to break a head term down into the phrases people use when they're ready to buy, measure those instead, and find out how much of that big number is actually yours.

What a head term really measures

A head term is the short, broad version of a topic. One or two words, big volume. Head terms are attractive because the number is large. But that number is the sum of everyone who typed those words, for every reason.

In episode twenty-one we sorted keywords by intent from the text alone: informational, commercial, transactional. A bare head term is the hardest case, because the text carries almost no intent. "Espresso" could be a question, a recipe search, or the start of a shopping trip. You can't tell from the word.

What you can do is measure the phrases that carry intent. People who are ready to buy add words. "Espresso machine for home." "Best espresso machine under five hundred." "Espresso machine with grinder." Those extra words are buying modifiers, and they're the part of the demand that a shop can actually serve.

I learned this the hard way on one of my own projects. The bare word had hundreds of times more search volume than the buying phrase. If I had planned the project from the head term, every forecast would have been wrong by two orders of magnitude.

The decomposition method

The method has five steps.

Step one. Write down the head term exactly as people search for it.

Step two. Build a modifier list. These are the words that signal buying or choosing. "Buy", "price", "best", "under" plus a price, "for home", "with grinder", "for beginners", "reviews", "cheap", "near me". Pick the ones that fit your business model. A shop needs different modifiers than a service or a comparison site.

Step three. Combine the head term with each modifier, in the orders people actually type. "Espresso machine for home" and "home espresso machine" are both worth testing.

Step four. Get volumes for all the combinations in one batch. With the DataForSEO Google Ads endpoint, one task takes up to a thousand keywords and costs about nine cents, so this is cheap. Two rules from experience: no commas, ampersands or slashes in the keywords, because one bad keyword fails the whole task. And a zero means below the measurement floor of around ten searches a month, not no searches at all. Episode nineteen covers that.

Step five. Add up the buying phrases, carefully, and divide by the head term volume. That gives you the buying share: how much of the big number is people who are shopping.

Worked example

Let's run it on example-shop.test, our fictional coffee equipment shop, with made-up numbers for illustration.

The head term "espresso" shows a hundred thousand a month. Now the buying phrases. "Espresso machine for home" and "espresso machines for home" both show two thousand four hundred. "Best espresso machine under five hundred" shows one thousand three hundred. "Espresso machine with grinder" shows three hundred and ninety. "Buy espresso machine online" shows two hundred and sixty. Several others show zero.

Here's the trap. "Espresso machine for home" and "espresso machines for home" have exactly the same volume. That's not a coincidence. It's one synonym group in Google's data, reported twice. If you add them together you double count. As we saw in episode twenty: equal volumes, count once.

So the buying demand is two thousand four hundred, plus thirteen hundred, plus three hundred and ninety, plus two hundred and sixty. About four and a half thousand a month. Against a head term of a hundred thousand, that's a buying share of around four and a half percent.

That's the number you plan with. Not a hundred thousand. Four and a half thousand, spread across a handful of phrases, each of which might need its own section or its own page.

One more check. Test how the phrase is written. Some terms are searched both as two words and as one compound word, and the two forms can have very different volumes. Think "pour over" versus "pourover". If you only test one spelling, you might miss the form people actually use.

Pitfalls

Three pitfalls.

First, not every modifier means buying. "Reviews" is a good example. "Espresso machine reviews" is someone choosing, not yet buying. That's still valuable for a shop, but it wants a different page: a list or a guide, not a product page. Keep a column for the type of intent next to each phrase.

Second, don't throw away the small phrases. A dozen phrases at a hundred searches each add up, and long phrases usually have weaker competition. And remember that zeros aren't nothing. When your own Search Console data shows impressions for a phrase the volume tool calls zero, that's evidence of real demand.

Third, volume is not the same as winnable. A buying phrase can have perfect intent and a results page full of giant marketplaces. Decomposition tells you where the demand is. Whether you can win it is the job of the next module, SERP analysis.

And the head term isn't useless. It can still be worth an informational article that links to your machine pages. Just don't plan revenue from it.

The output: a decomposition sheet

The output is a decomposition sheet. One row per head term: the head volume, the buying phrases you found, the buying volume with synonym groups counted once, the buying share, and a short page plan.

Sort it by buying volume, not head volume. The order usually changes a lot. Head terms that looked huge drop down, and some modest topics with strong buying phrases rise to the top.

That sorted sheet goes straight into the go or no-go decision we'll build in episode thirty-five.

Wrap-up

So: a big head term is a sum of many intents. Break it down, measure the buying phrases, and count synonym groups once. The modifier list and the decomposition sheet are linked in the description. Next episode, we start the SERP module: how to do a SERP analysis by hand, step by step. See you there.