Buyer Keywords: The List, a Scoring Method, and the LinkedIn Version

Buyer keywords are the search terms people type when they are close to paying, not when they are still learning. "Best CRM for a two person sales team" is one. "What is a CRM" is not. The difference is worth more than any ranking trick, because one query brings you a reader and the other brings you a buyer.

I run a LinkedIn prospecting agency and I am building an outbound product, so I care about these words in two places: on our pages, and in the sentences prospects write on LinkedIn. The same vocabulary works in both, which is why this page ends somewhere most keyword guides never go.

What you will find: the three ingredients of a buyer keyword, 38 search patterns sorted by intent tier, a way to score any list in twenty minutes without a paid tool, the traps in keyword tool columns, the page each tier needs, and 10 phrases buyers write on LinkedIn instead of typing them into Google.

What makes a keyword a buyer keyword

You will also see them called buyer intent keywords or high intent keywords. Same thing. The shortest test I know: if a good answer to the query is a product page, it is a buyer keyword. If a good answer is a paragraph, it is not.

Three ingredients make the difference, and you usually need at least two.

A commercial modifier. Buy, pricing, cost, quote, demo, trial, alternatives, vs, best, top, review, near me. The modifier is what shifts a topic into a transaction.

A specific product or category. "Software" is a topic. "LinkedIn automation tool for agencies" is a purchase. "Expandi alternative" is a purchase with a shortlist already attached. Specificity is what makes a low volume term worth more than a high volume one.

A qualifier that matches your offer. Team size, market, budget, geography, integration. "CRM with LinkedIn integration" tells you what the person already uses and what they will ask you on the first call.

A term that has all three, like "Waalaxy alternative for a two person agency", has almost no volume and converts better than anything else on your site. That trade is the whole game in B2B: volume is a vanity metric when your total market is a few thousand companies.

The four intent tiers

Ranking terms by tier is faster than ranking them by volume, and it tells you what the page needs to do.

Most teams write for the bottom row and wonder why traffic does not convert. Start at the top and work down. Transactional and commercial pages are also the ones a competitor cannot easily copy, because they need real product knowledge and a real opinion.

A buyer keywords list you can copy

Take these 38 patterns and drop your category into the brackets. Each group is ordered by how close the searcher is to a decision.

Ready to buy

• buy [product]
• [product] pricing
• [product] cost per user
• [product] price list
• how much does [product] cost
• [product] free trial
• [product] demo
• [product] discount
• [product] annual plan
• [category] quote

Comparing vendors

• best [category] tools
• top [category] software
• [competitor] alternatives
• alternative to [competitor]
• [competitor] vs [competitor]
• [category] comparison
• [competitor] review
• [competitor] pricing explained
• is [competitor] worth it
• [category] for [segment], for example "for agencies", "for startups", "for solo founders"

Ready to switch

• [competitor] cancel subscription
• [competitor] not working
• migrate from [competitor]
• [competitor] competitors
• cheaper than [competitor]
• [competitor] complaints

Looking for a fix

• how to automate [task]
• [task] template
• [task] checklist
• best way to [task]
• [task] software for small teams
• [category] with [integration] integration
• [category] api

Learning, still useful

• what is [category]
• [category] meaning
• [category] examples
• [category] benefits
• types of [category]

The "ready to switch" group is the one people forget. Someone searching "cancel" or "not working" for a competitor is already unhappy, and the page that meets them there costs almost nothing to write.

How to find the buyer intent keywords in your own market

Five sources, in the order I use them.

1. Your Search Console. Filter queries by the modifiers above. If a term already brings impressions and no clicks, you have a page to fix, not a page to write.

2. Your competitors' page titles. Their comparison and pricing pages tell you which terms are worth defending. If three competitors all published "X vs Y", it converts for them.

3. Sales calls and support tickets. Write down the exact phrasing prospects use for their problem. Buyers rarely use the category name the industry uses. They say "stop chasing people manually", not "outbound orchestration".

4. Review sites and communities. The compare pages on review sites, and the "recommend an alternative to" threads, are pure purchase vocabulary. Bombora made the same point about paid search in its buyer intent keywords primer.

5. Autocomplete and related searches. Type your category plus "for", "vs", "alternative", "pricing" and read what Google suggests. That is a free list of terms people actually type.

Then sort what you found into the four tiers, and score it before you write anything.

Score a list in twenty minutes

Volume tools label intent with a guess. You can do better in twenty minutes with the actual search results, which is the only place intent is really recorded.

For each term, open the first page of results in a US search and give one point for each of these four:

1. Result shape. Are the top five results product pages, comparison pages or pricing pages? One point. All definitions and dictionary entries? Zero, whatever the tool labels it.
2. Ads. Is anyone paying for the term? Someone spending money on it every day has already tested whether it converts.
3. Vocabulary. Does the query carry at least one of the three ingredients above: a modifier, a named product or category, a qualifier? One point, even if it carries all three.
4. Your right to win. Can you say something on this page that the current top five cannot? A price you publish, a limit you admit, a workflow you run weekly. If not, you are writing the eleventh copy of the same article.

Three points or more, write it. Two, park it. Less, leave it to someone with a bigger domain. This scoring costs nothing, needs no subscription, and it beats any intent column in a keyword tool because it reads the same evidence Google already acted on.

Google's own guidance on people first content says the same in different words: the page has to be worth the click for the person typing the query. Its guidance for AI features in Search adds the part that matters most for buyer keywords: a direct answer near the top of the page is what gets quoted when an assistant summarizes the result.

Where keyword tools mislead you in B2B

Four traps, all of which cost me time before I stopped trusting the columns.

Volume hides the buyers. In a niche market, a buyer keyword often reports 10 to 50 searches a month, or nothing at all. Tools round small numbers to zero. Some of the best terms we have look like empty rows.

The intent label is inferred, not measured. Two tools regularly disagree on the same term. The search results do not disagree with themselves.

Difficulty scores describe the average competitor, not you. A term with a difficulty of 30 is easy if the pages ranking for it are thin and none of them publishes a price. Look at what ranks, not at the number.

Volume mixes audiences. "Sales automation jobs" and "sales automation" share a root and share nothing else. Job seekers, students and analysts inflate a number that has no buyers in it.

The fix is boring: pull the terms from the tool, then judge them by hand against the results. Tools are good at finding candidates and bad at ranking them.

Which page each tier deserves

A term is only useful once it has a page shaped for it. Four shapes cover almost everything in B2B.

A pricing term gets your pricing page, with the number visible and no form in front of it. Hiding the price to capture a lead loses the visitor who was ready to pay, and those are the rarest visitors you get.

A comparison or alternative term gets one page per competitor, not a single grouped page. Someone searching for one product wants a page about that product, and a page covering nine of them at once answers nobody in particular. Cover the competitors buyers actually name on calls, including the ones you lose to, and say where they are better. The reader already knows, and admitting it is what makes the rest credible.

A "best tools" term gets a listicle with a real opinion and a stated criterion for the order. Ranking by nothing is why most of those pages are ignored.

A problem aware term gets a how to page that solves the problem without the product, then mentions the product once at the end. If the page only works when the reader buys something, it is an ad.

Whatever the shape, repeating the term does not move it. One clear title, one honest answer in the first paragraph, and a page that lets someone act.

The LinkedIn version: buyer keywords people write, not type

This is the part most SEO articles miss, and the reason this page exists on an outbound product's site.

Someone close to a purchase does not only type it into Google. They write it on LinkedIn, in a post, in a comment, in a job ad. Same vocabulary, same moment in the buying cycle, except this time the words come attached to a name, a company and a job title. Here are 10 phrasings I watch for:

• looking for a tool that [does the task]
• any recommendation for [category]
• can anyone recommend a [category]
• is there a good alternative to [competitor]
• switching from [competitor]
• we just dropped [competitor]
• who do you use for [task]
• is anyone using [competitor]
• [competitor] or [competitor], which one
• hiring a [role] to build [function] from scratch

That makes buyer keywords useful as monitoring terms, not just ranking terms. Three places to watch:

• Posts and the people around them. A keyword search with quoted phrases, such as "any recommendation" AND ("outreach tool" OR "linkedin automation"), surfaces the posts where someone is shopping out loud. Answer the author yourself, in public. The people who react or comment "same question here" are often in the same spot, while the ones replying with a pitch are vendors, so filter on fit before you write to anyone.
• Job ads. The phrases that only appear when your problem exists, and the names of the tools a company already runs. A job ad asking for "experience with Salesforce" tells you the stack; one asking someone to "build outbound from scratch" tells you there is no process yet.
• Your own profile. Watch who views it in the week after you publish on the exact topic they are searching.

The message then writes itself, because you can quote the words they used. That raw material is what vendors package and sell as B2B intent data, and if you would rather buy it than collect it, the account level feeds are compared in intent data providers and the person level tools in buying signals software. I listed the signals I use week to week, with the first line that goes with each, in how to identify buying signals. Turning a signal into a sequence that runs on time is outbound sales automation, the operational half of everything on this page.

Where Sendable fits

Sendable, the product I am building with my cofounder, does nothing for your rankings. It covers the LinkedIn version of this page:

• Keyword engagement runs the keyword search above on LinkedIn posts, keeps the ones with enough reactions and comments, and collects the people who reacted or commented.
• Job post mentions a keyword finds job ads from the past 14 days that contain your phrase or a tool name, then the people at those companies who hold the titles you pick.
• Post interactions and influencer engagement do the same for posts you choose, or for the posts of people your buyers follow.
• Profile viewers covers the third place to watch, if the account has LinkedIn Premium.

Every person is filtered with AI against the customer you describe, and the ones that fit enter a LinkedIn sequence you build. You still write the messages, ideally quoting the words that put them on your list, and you answer the replies. It is LinkedIn only, no email, and it does no keyword research or rank tracking: the search half stays with your site. Pricing is $49 per connected LinkedIn account per month, or $490 per account per year, the same for every account.

A 7-day free trial, no card is enough to run one keyword search and read who comes back. The full list of LinkedIn signals Sendable watches is on the homepage.

FAQ

What are buyer keywords?

Buyer keywords are search terms that show someone is close to a purchase rather than still researching. They usually combine a commercial modifier such as buy, pricing, best, alternative or demo with a specific product or category, and often a qualifier like team size or an integration. They convert better than informational terms and carry far less volume.

What is the difference between buyer keywords, buyer intent keywords and high intent keywords?

None in practice. All three name terms that signal a purchase decision is near. Some teams use purchase keywords or purchasing keywords for the most transactional group, such as "buy" and "pricing", and keep the broader names for the wider set that includes comparisons and alternatives.

How do I build a buyer keywords list for B2B?

Pull the modifiers from this page, add your category and your competitors' names, then check each term against your Search Console, your competitors' page titles, and the language prospects use on calls. Score each candidate against the live search results, sort the keepers into transactional, commercial, problem aware and informational, and write the top two tiers first.

Are low volume purchase keywords worth targeting?

Yes, in B2B they are usually the only ones worth targeting. If your market is a few thousand companies, a term with 20 monthly searches and clear purchase language can be worth more than a term with 2,000 searches from students and job seekers. Judge a term by who types it, not by the number next to it.

Can I use buyer keywords for outbound and not just SEO?

Yes. The same phrases show up in job ads, LinkedIn posts and comments, where they come attached to a named person at a named company. Watching for words like alternative, switching, recommendation or looking for in your niche gives you people with visible intent, which is a better starting point for a first message than any static list.