When determining which phrases your site should be optimized for, or when searching for the right phrases to bid on in your paid search campaign, wouldn’t it be great to have an idea of what people are thinking when searching for that phrase?

Microsoft adCenter Labs released an interesting tool focused around determining the level of commercial intent for search phrases.  Here’s how it works.  Type in a word or phrase, and the tool will give you a measure of the likelihood that the phrase will lead to a commercial transaction.

For example, the tool says that “dvd player” has a commercial intent of 0.63816, while “sony progressive scan dvd player” has a commercial intent of 0.86043.  The higher the number, the more likely that the search phrase will yield a transaction.

You can use this data to determine what phrases are more likely to yield transactions for your company (or web site).  I used this free tool in a trial paid search campaign for a client.  We targeted one exact phrase which had a commercial intent of 0.47, and a variation of the original term that had a commercial intent of 0.81.  The ad copy and the landing pages were identical except for the use of the search phrases in the headlines on the ads and landing pages.  The results?  The term with higher commercial intent received nearly double the conversion rate of the term with lower commercial intent according to the adCenter tool.

Personally, I would use paid search to test terms rather than just relying solely on the commercial intent tool, but the tool has been fairly accurate in my experience.  Try it out now.

The newest keyword research tool available is Google Insights for Search.

This new tool lets you type in a search phrase and graphs out interest over time.  While the graph will tell you how many searches have been done for a particular term over time, the numbers aren’t absolute search volume numbers, just a gauge of popularity.

You can also see regional interest for a particular term, either targeting a country, or if you choose the United States, you can see search popularity for that term by state.  You can even get a breakdown by city.

So how is this helpful?  Here’s one way to use the tool.  If a client wants a paid search campaign, and the campaign lends itself to geotargeting, we can run the advertisements in popular areas to get the biggest impact.

If you advertise locally via paid search, you might also find the search phrases that give you the largest number of impressions in your market.

Of course, the trend graphing feature is impressive.  You can learn how many searches occurred for a particular phrase over time, and you can learn about related top searches and searches that are on the rise.