Want to know the key to increasing your organic website traffic? Spoiler alert: it’s not about picking keywords with the most search volume, choosing an “SEO-friendly” website platform, or getting all the green lights on Yoast SEO. All of these things are fine, but if your SEO strategy is riding on one or all of them, you’re in trouble.
So what should you be focused on instead? Two words: user intent. It’s the secret sauce to an SEO strategy that *actually* works.
Let’s dig in.
What is user intent?
User intent is what a user wants or expects to find when they search a keyword or query.
So if you want to understand user intent, you have to understand the psychology behind why people do what they do on Google. Sounds simple enough, right? In some ways it totally is, but it also requires a really custom, tailored strategy for each keyword. In my experience being in SEO since 2016, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to understanding user intent. Here’s what I mean:
A Small Business Example
Let’s say you own a small business that does email marketing. You want to incorporate SEO into your marketing, and you naturally assume that you need to rank for “email marketing.” That makes sense. That’s the service you offer. So you make sure to use that keyword in your home page copy, in your headers, in your URL, in your meta data, in your alt text, and image title. You’ve checked all the boxes, right? (This is another topic for another day but you’ve also probably keyword stuffed, which can be problematic.)
Here’s what might surprise you: when people search for “email marketing” they are not actually looking for a company that does email marketing. Wait, WHAT? Yeah, this sounds counterintuitive, I get it. Hang with me.
When people search “email marketing,” they’re actually looking for information about “what email marketing is.”
These people are not ready to buy, and they are not ready to do research about individual companies that offer this service. They are looking for information; they are still in the learning phase. So if you want to rank for “email marketing,” you don’t need a keyword explosion on your home page (I’d argue you don’t need that anywhere on your site). What you probably need is a long article that covers what email marketing is and how it helps businesses make more money. You need to sell them on email marketing before you can sell them on your company.
When you understand THAT, it will change the kind of content you write, the way you speak to that potential customer, and the way you move them through your content to ultimately make the sale.
When you’re thinking about user intent, you have to be aware that this is totally case-by-case depending on the keyword. There’s no one size fits all for a certain industry or type of question; it requires personal, custom research if you want to hit the nail on the head. But that’s exactly what’s required if you want to rank on Google.
That said, there are categories of intent that can be helpful in terms of organization(and especially when it comes to moving readers through a clear content funnel).
Types of User Intent
Here’s an overview of different types of user intent that can really help you wrap your head around this concept.
Navigational Intent
This is the classic “I know where I need to go; I just don’t want to type in the web address.” Think search queries like “blue cross log in” or “amazon.” You probably conduct these types of searches all the time yourself; I know I do.
How to Write for Navigational Intent
The thing with navigational intent is that from an SEO perspective, there is not a lot to optimize for here. The main thing you want is to make sure there are no blockers in the way of people being able to find you when they are specifically looking for you.
Local Intent
This type of intent includes searches looking for a service in a particular location. We’re talking “pizza near me” or “best state parks in California.” It can also include queries like “pharmacy open now.” The key idea here is that the searcher is limiting their options to a certain location, and it often involves businesses or restaurants that have physical locations.
How to Write for Local Intent
If you’re a local business, the best thing you can do is to make sure you optimize for your location (or multiple locations). That means your keywords are likely going to actually include your location (like “wedding photographer in Little Rock, AR” as opposed to just trying to rank for “wedding photographer”). This strategy should include your home page, service pages, blog articles (if it applies), and Google Business Profile.
If you’re a digital creator who can work from anywhere and serve clients all over the map, you are most likely not going to focus on a local intent. Instead you’ll hone in on informational and commercial intents (keep reading!).
Informational Intent
This category of intent represents searchers who are looking for more information. They are in the learning stage of the journey. The example we talked about earlier with “email marketing” is a good example of that. These searchers are not ready to make a purchase, but this is still a great opportunity for content to build trust.
How to Write for Informational Intent
For informational intent, what you’re looking to create with your content is a one-stop-shop for all of the information about this topic. You want your blog post or article to be incredibly thorough, tackling the topic from as many angles as possible. Bonus points for weaving in your own personal experience or career expertise. The idea is that someone could read your article and get all of the information they need without having to go to other sources.
Informational intent gets even easier to spot with queries like “what is a tax refund?” or “what is the average age to get married in the US?” The “what is” is usually a giveaway of informational intent. The exception is when it’s used for a comparison query, like we’ll see in the next section.
Commercial Intent
This type of intent often begins with a “what is,” but the intent is to compare different options in order to make a choice.
Examples of a commercial intent are queries like “where is the best place to vacation in Florida?” or “pay off debt or invest first.”
How to Write for Commercial Intent
When it comes to writing for commercial intent, it is really important to use comparison type articles as a way to build trust, not just to promote the thing you offer. You’re aiming to provide as unbiased a perspective as possible that highlights the pros and cons of different approaches. It’s ok to give your opinion (and actually most readers — and Google for that matter — actually appreciate the personal nature of a recommendation), but it’s important to own that it’s your personal opinion and not an objective truth.
Transactional Intent
A user with a transactional intent is beyond the educational stage and is looking to make a purchase ASAP. The types of searches that fit in this category are queries like “paw patrol party decorations” or “peloton bike for sale.”
You can identify these queries by how specific the search is. In both examples, I have already decided I am buying paw patrol decorations or a peloton. All I’m comparing at this point are prices.
How to Write for Transactional Intent
For these types of search queries, it’s similar to navigational intent where you just don’t want anything to get in the way of the searcher. You want all of your product’s information front and center. That means clear and concise product descriptions, prices, shipping times, reviews, etc. on those product pages.
It’s really common with these types of searches for people to utilize “google shopping,” and if you want your product to show up there you need to have schema implemented on your website.
User Intent Is Not One Size-Fits-All
There are a variety of other ways to talk about intent that don’t quite fit into one of these boxes. Sometimes user intent is fractured (meaning they have a variety of intents, which is incredibly common if you think about your own searches).
And sometimes things get even more ambiguous than that. Think about when someone searches for a term like “flowers.” There are a lot of possible intents for that one term, and you’ll see them all reflected in what Google serves: photos of bouquets you can buy with one-click, a local Google Business section showing local florists, and a link to Miley Cyrus’s song. Over time, Google will fine tune the results based on what the majority of people click on, but some of these searches will always represent a variety of intents and thus, a variety of options.
How to Identify User Intent
Ok, I’ve given a lot of information, but let’s get more practical. How do you actually figure out what the user intent of a keyword is?
My favorite way to get started is to do an incognito search and see what Google is prioritizing in the search results. That is usually a pretty accurate indicator of what the user intent is. And then if your goal is to rank, you have to actually meet that user intent even better than the current ranking sources.
I also love using software like Semrush (my favorite subscription based tool) or Ubersuggest (a great free option). A great exercise for looking into the current performance of your own website is to plug in your domain into one of these options and see the percentage of searches that fit into each type of intent. For the record, even Semrush and ubersuggest don’t label these correctly every time, so a Google search is the best way to get an accurate read. And you can do that on your own, for free!
Need More SEO Support?
Once you wrap your head around user intent and get some practice working it into your own SEO strategy, you’ll find that your whole marketing strategy gets a lot easier and more intuitive. Because what it’s really about is getting in the head of your potential clients and customers. And that makes everything you do more intentional and effective.
If you need the 1:1 support of an SEO strategist in your corner, reach out. I offer a variety of services to meet you where you are — everything from a la carte strategy calls to full-service SEO consulting to help you improve and hang on to your rankings. You don’t have to do it alone. Let’s talk!
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