With search engine optimization (SEO), you can get a lot more traffic to your site. Once you rank higher in the engines, you can bring in more traffic to grow your business. At some point, you might want to use SEO in place of expensive advertising to bring in regular visitors. Still, to convince others to make a purchase and get on your site, you’ll need to consider search intent. Understanding it can help you optimize each page to bring in as many people as possible.
What is Search Intent?
Understanding audience intent means you can tell why someone looks for a specific thing online. In some cases, the user may wish to make a purchase.
The user journey is made up of many different searches, and each one can help drive traffic to your site. Today’s search engines have worked hard on improving their algorithms to find what audiences are looking for, and the pages that best fit the criteria are the ones that end up on the top. This type of SEO can help you drive traffic to multiply your revenue, so read on to discover the power of intent SEO from Granwehr and what it can do for your website.
Users Looking for Information
Many times, people going online are hunting for information. That could include everything from education to weather to SEO itself. People with this intent want to know something specific or need to learn more about some topic.
Search engines do more than just show results that offer information about that term. For instance, these tools know that someone looking for results on chicken is likely seeking recipes, not its history. And someone looking for how-to information is most likely hunting for images and videos as well as text results. That means you’ll want to include a range of media on your web pages.
Navigational
This search means that someone might want to visit a specific site. For instance, someone might be trying to find your website’s name. However, while it is great to rank high for your site’s name, it might not bring in that much additional organic traffic. It only helps if someone was looking for your brand, to begin with. You may have a partnership with another brand, and your site could show up in results when people look for that other brand. But it might not help you that much since these users are likely hunting for the other website. You can always check thatagency.com for all you need to know.
Users Planning to Make a Purchase
According to search specialists at Safari Digital, Breanna Golub, many people are wanting to buy products or services online, and they could be looking for the best deal on this next purchase. Transactional intent means they want to purchase something. But this is not the only type of search that someone looking to make a purchase could do.
Sometimes, someone online is trying to make a purchase soon and do research on the web. They may be hunting for the best car or wish to discover the most helpful plugins for their websites for email. Even if they want to purchase something, you might need to convince them that your product or service is the best. These searches are often known as commercial investigating.
Users use specific words in their queries, which offers insight into what they were hunting for. Some words that might signify commercial investigating can include:
- Discount
- Buy
- Deal
- Specific names of products
And informational searches may contain terms such as “why,” “information on,” or “how to.” You’ll become more familiar with these as time goes on.
Classifying the Intent of Your Audience
It is not always that clear what someone wants to find when going online. You might accidentally classify something as commercial when it is informational. For instance, if someone is hunting for “small business SEO,” you might think it is small business owners hunting for SEO providers, making it commercial.
But if you look up that term yourself, you may find there are not that many commercial results after the ads. Instead, you’ll notice informational content. Reviewing the results lets you understand what the engine thinks the intent is, letting you create the best strategy. Classifying keywords in this way will help you avoid accidentally ranking the incorrect content. If you try to rank a product or service page for informational keywords, you will not see that much relevant traffic.
Don’t just trust your feelings to understand how to classify each keyword. Scan the results carefully to get the best idea of what’s going on. Then you can create the best SEO campaign.
How Do You Optimize Your Pages?
Ensure that each landing page fits your audience’s intent. If they are trying to find specific information, you don’t want just to sell them products. Instead, add value and establish yourself as a reputable website. On the other hand, if you know that someone wants to make a purchase, you wouldn’t want to put long articles or many images in their way. In that case, you could send them straight to your shop.
Look for commercial keywords to have in mind when optimizing product and service pages. For example, if you sell gardening kits, you could optimize a specific product page for the keyword “buy gardening kits.” And if you have an article about how to use these kits, you can optimize it for phrases like “how to use gardening kits.”
It’s sometimes hard to determine a query’s intent. Users may have varying intentions but end up on similar pages. Spend some time on the results pages to discover the best way to create your content based on what users are trying to find.
Don’t be afraid to go straight to the source either – your audience. Place a survey on your webpage with questions about what they were hunting for. Then you can set the survey in a prominent location, such as a popup box, when users get to your pages. You might be surprised at the insights you gain into your audience.
