I once got thousands of views on Reddit and almost nothing came of it.
Not zero traffic. Real people, real clicks, a spike in the analytics that looked genuinely exciting for about a day. And then essentially no signups. Nothing that turned into money.
That is the moment I properly understood the difference between traffic and buyers, and it is the reason I care about buyer intent keywords more than I care about traffic numbers.
What a buyer intent keyword actually is
A buyer intent keyword is a search where the person has already decided to solve the problem and is now working out how. They are not learning. They are shopping.
The difference shows up in the wording:
Low intent. “what is a pwa”, “how does affiliate marketing work”, “wordpress vs squarespace”. Curiosity. Possibly a student. Possibly somebody who will never buy anything.
High intent. “best wordpress membership plugin”, “convertkit alternative”, “hire someone to build a wordpress site”, “how much does a membership site cost”. Every one of those has a decision sitting behind it.
Same topic. Completely different person.
The four shapes worth learning
After enough time staring at search data, most buyer intent falls into four patterns.
Best / top / review. They have accepted they need the thing and are choosing between options. “best idea validation tools”.
Alternative / vs / competitor names. The highest intent of the lot. Somebody searching “X alternative” is already paying for X and is unhappy. They have a budget and a reason to move.
Price / cost / pricing. They are building a business case. Nobody searches for pricing idly.
Hire / service / done for you / near me. They have given up on doing it themselves. This is the shortest path to revenue there is.
Underneath all four is one question: has this person already decided to spend money, and are they now just deciding where?
Why the traffic articles never worked for me
I have written plenty of things that got views and produced nothing, and the pattern is always the same. I wrote for the top of the funnel because top-of-funnel keywords have bigger numbers, and bigger numbers feel like progress.
They are not progress. A thousand people who wanted a definition are worth less than ten people searching for an alternative to the thing they are currently paying for.
The Reddit thing was the clearest version of it, but I have done the same on my own sites for years. It is a genuinely seductive mistake, because the analytics reward you immediately and the bank account does not.
How to find them without a subscription
You do not need an expensive tool to start.
Type your category into Google and read the autocomplete, then read the “people also ask” box. Look at what your competitors put in their navigation, because pricing and comparison pages exist where the money is. Search your competitors’ names with “alternative” after them. Go into the subreddits and forums where your customers actually are and look for posts that start with “has anyone found a” or “what are you all using for”.
Those last ones are buyer intent in its rawest form: somebody stating, in public, that they are looking to spend money and have not decided where.
Paid tools like Ahrefs, Semrush or Keywords Everywhere make this faster and give you volume numbers. They do not make the thinking any easier, and the thinking is the part that matters.
Volume is the trap
The keyword with ten searches a month and obvious purchase intent beats the one with ten thousand searches and none. This is the single most useful thing I have learned about search, and it took me embarrassingly long.
Low volume also means low competition, which means you can actually rank. High-volume informational terms are contested by people with budgets you do not have.
Where this connects to whether the idea works at all
Buyer intent keywords are not only a content tactic. They are one of the cleanest pieces of evidence you can get that a market has money in it.
If people are actively searching for alternatives, prices and services in your category, somebody is already paying for something. That is real demand, and it is a far better signal than anyone telling you your idea sounds great.
That is one of the things the Marketur Reality Check looks at when it pressure-tests an idea: whether there is evidence of demand that is not just your own enthusiasm, and who already owns the distribution to reach it. It is free and needs no account.
If you are earlier than that and still deciding whether to build at all, start with how to validate a business idea before you spend money.
And if you take one thing from this: stop optimising for the number that goes up fastest. I did that for years. The graph looked wonderful.