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What are money keywords in SEO?

Updated: February 8, 2024 Published: August 1, 2023

Karsten Madsen CEO

Karsten Madsen

Co-founder & CEO @ Morningscore.io

Money keywords in SEO are a very important concept to grasp. It’s not something you can look up in the dictionary since it’s a definition that’s mostly used in everyday talk.

I see more and more experts using the term, and I personally like it.

The definition of a money keyword

In SEO, you can, roughly speaking, target two different kinds of keywords:

Keywords that lead to a sale. I call that “money keyword“.
Keywords that answer people’s questions “research keyword“.

Example of a money keyword:

“send flowers Amsterdam” is a money keyword since it’s someone looking to buy. You want to rank for this keyword on a page that can lead users to buy.

Example of a research keyword:

“how to decorate with flowers” is someone looking for a guide. Not to buy. Like blog articles. They might be persuaded to buy after having their question answered, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that your brand helped them.

How to work with money keywords and research keywords

I always advise people to start with adding or improving their money keywords on their website if they are getting into SEO.
But research keywords can also lift up money keywords (this is called topical authority). For that and other reasons, it’s a clear step 2 once you have covered your money keywords.

If you want a quick example of the difference between money keywords and research keywords, take a look at the footer of this website as shown in this video:

In the video, I illustrate which pages in the footer target money keywords and which target research keywords. You could visit those pages to get a feel for the difference and apply the same logic on your website. An SEO tool that can help you find the right keywords is a big help in that process.

Conversion rate of money keywords

In my own experience, money keywords tend to convert 20 times better than research keywords. A very rough number.
On our own website, we see that research keywords convert 0.5% of traffic to free trials for Morningscore.

And money keywords convert 10%.

(Actually, some of our money keyword pages convert above 30% – it’s insane 🤑)

To be fair, our site draws A LOT more traffic from research keywords.

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But still, money keywords are the clear overall winner in driving customers.

As you can see in the screenshot from our analytics tool Plausible, our overall conversion rate from Google traffic (SEO) over a period of 14 days is just below 5%.

This would be impossible if we relied on research keywords. So money keywords really does “bring the money home” in our case.

Money keywords increase our conversion rate

I hope this short guide helped you understand what money keywords are in SEO and why experts are focused on it. And I wish you succces with it 👍️

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