To be successful with your SEO campaigns today, the most important thing to consider is user intent. Behind every search, there is an intention. People are looking for something in particular when they search, whether it’s the answers to their problems, information about available services, or sources for a product they want. If you want people to be able to discover your business online, your content must be optimized for user intent.
Google’s algorithm has come a long way in its ability to recognize user intent, and that’s how it serves the most relevant content to the user. As a result, understanding user intent as you create content will improve the relevance of your website, and thus go a great way toward improving your SEO.
Understanding the Types of User Intent
To create an SEO strategy based on user intent, you must first be able to tell the difference between the types of user intent. Search Google with the terms your audience will be looking for, and based on what you see, you’ll be able to determine the type of content users want to see at the various stages of intent.
Informational
In the informational stage, users are trying to gather more information about a topic or product, but are not ready to buy. This is where you’ll find how-to posts and tutorials particularly useful. There are generally no ads on these types of searches because there isn’t a particular product to buy.
Navigational
In the navigational stage, the user is looking for content to help consider their options, but still isn’t ready to buy. This is where you’ll find best of lists and the like, to help people make their decision. Options may contain links to buy, but the sites are not pushing making the sale too hard.
Transactional
At this stage, the user is ready to buy. They have their credit card in hand and are ready to purchase. They may search “where can I buy?” Most of the search results that will show up are from online stores that sell the product the user wants to buy. These sites are delivering product pages, because they know based on the nature of the query, the user already has the information they need.
Audit Your Existing Content
Now, you’ll take a look at whether or not your existing content matches the needs of your audience. You can do this with Google Analytics. Take a look at your top performing keywords. If you determine that your top performing keyword, “buy laptop”, a transactional keyword, leads to a blog post with tips on how to choose the best laptop for your needs, you’re not giving users what they want.
In this case, you should adjust your strategy so that people who search for “buy laptop” are taken to a product page instead of an informative blog post. This way, your users get what they are looking for, and you’ll get more conversions.
Look at your other blog posts. If users aren’t seeing them, start incorporating more informational keywords. And if your product pages aren’t showing up in the search results, add some transactional keywords to improve your ranking for that user intent.
Create Content with User Intent in Mind
Keywords are an important part of your SEO strategy, but they aren’t the only thing you need to consider. You must craft the content around the keywords, based on user intent. Because Google understands user intent, if your content doesn’t match the intent for your keyword, you won’t rank for it no matter how well other factors indicate that you should.
For instance, if you are targeting the long-tail keyword phases, “how to bake a cherry pie” but you stray from that subject in your blog post and it ends up being more about how to grow a cherry tree, you won’t show up in any results related to baking. Instead, your content will show up in searches related to gardening, which doesn’t match your target audience. You’ll get traffic both ways, of course, but without matching intent, that traffic won’t be targeted, which means conversions will suffer, and ultimately, so will your revenue.
Plan content for each type of user intent as this will help guide users through each stage of the buyer’s journey. That way, users will discover you in the informational stage, and they’ll find helpful content from you again once they move to the navigational phase. At this point, you’ll have built up some trust and credibility with the audience so you can nurture them all the way through buying your product or service.
Take a look at all the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Separate them into buckets based on intent. Create content that supports that intent, even if it means reworking, or completely scrapping your existing content. Each time you conduct keyword research to find more potential ranking opportunities, make sure you first understand the intent of the keyword.
Knowing (and making use of) user intent will make your SEO strategy that much more successful. By following this advice, you’ll be serving your audience with highly useful content at the right stage of the journey, and will keep them coming to your site. It’ll go a long way toward ensuring those people become your customers, and start referring more customers to you.
If you want help with crafting a user-intent based SEO strategy, you can reach out to the team here at Sachs Marketing Group.
Eric Sachs
SEO virtuoso, CEO @Sachs Marketing Group. Focused on being of service to business owners - helping to better position them in the eyes of their audiences.
