Searching for a Business

In a previous post I talked about location qualifiers, in this post I'm talking about a similar concept, business qualifiers. The question is, what words do people use when they are looking for a business. Here's a few that I came up with.

General Business

• Business
• Company
• Sole trader
• Enterprise

Service Provider

• Agency
• Firm
• Partnership
• Service
• Consultant
  

Goods Provider

• Product
• Shop
• Store
• Market

Its clear that some of these words would be used in specific situations such as 'accounting firm' instead of 'accounting business.' But, for other words its not so clear. Lets look at some definitions.

• Business- A business is a legally recognised organisation designed to provide goods and/or services to consumers- Wikipedia
  
• Company- A company is a body corporate or corporation company registered under the Companies Acts or similar legislation. It does not include a partnership or any other unincorporated group of persons, although such an entity may be loosely described as a company- Wikipedia
  
• Agency- A business or organisation established to provide a particular service, typically one that involves organising transactions between two other parties- Google
  
• Firm- A business concern, esp. one involving a partnership of two or more people- Google
• Enterprise- a company organised for commercial purposes; business firm- Dictionary.com

As you can see, there is a lot of similarity between the definitions so it would seem likely that people would often use them largely interchangeably, depending on what they're used to in each context. Here's some search traffic and competition data for each business qualifier.

Business Qualifier	Search Volume	Competing Pages
Business	2,740,000	296 million
Shop	2,240,000	85.8 million
Service	1,830,000	261 million
Store	1,830,000	83.2 million
Company	1,220,000	446 million
Market	1,220,000	96.6 million
Product	450,000	105 million
Agency	368,000	59.8 million
Enterprise	165,000	25.2 million
Consultant	110,000	18.7 million
Firm	90,500	31.5 million
Partnership	60,500	12.8 million
Sole Trader	18,100	0.256 million

What does this mean?

When doing keyword research we need to take into account the different ways that someone could look for a business. If its not the normal way that people look for a business, such as 'accounting business' instead of the norm 'accounting firm,' you might find the keyword has much less competition and is more profitable to target.

What 'business qualifiers' do you use when searching for businesses?