SEO is primarily a way to get traffic to your website. You optimize your content for the right keywords and, as soon as search engine bots get a hold of your new awesome piece of content, traffic starts pouring in.
Sounds easy, right?
Yes, theorizing something is always easy.
But traffic doesn’t pay the bills. Nor your staff members. Nor your taxes. You see where I’m going with this.
You don’t really need traffic. You need traffic from users who are ready to click, buy, or act on your CTAs.
And this is where search intent comes into play. Search intent is not just the key to getting the right people to your website, but also the key to getting any people there. It’s the proverbial stone that you can use to kill two birds.
Let’s see how it can do that.
Search intent, also known as user intent or audience intent, is a phrase used to describe the goal of an online search. In other words, what does the user hope to find when they input a query in the search bar?
Of course, everyone hopes to find something. But is it an answer to a question? A specific website? Are they looking to buy something?
All these options can be part of the buyer’s journey. A user might have a question about sports shoes, for instance: which are the best running shoes? As soon as they have that figured out, they might be looking for a specific online shop to find those shoes. Or they might be looking for any shop that sells them.
Google has been working on improving its search algorithm to better depict user intent for years now. Today, the search engine knows which pages are the best fit for a certain term. Well, most of the time — it is a work in progress.
But that work is on them.
Let’s see what’s on you and why search intent matters to traffic volume and to the quality of the traffic.
The first thing you should know is that Google has a full-blown obsession with search intent. They introduced it years ago in a document that’s now the Bible of SEO experts, The Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
It takes up quite a few pages. But that’s not all from our friends at Google.
Allan Thygesen, President of the Americas at Google, published an editorial on why search intent matters. It’s just one of the many on the same topic you can find on Think with Google. I chose this one because of who the author is.
However, all of them tell the same story: other SEO signals like backlinks and content length still matter. But if your content is not aligned with search intent, it will not rank.
Repeat after me: no user intent alignment, no ranking. Consequently, no organic traffic.
Can’t we fool the machines? Not really, no.
You see, search intent is just one of the many interdependent signals search engines use. They will analyze it along with other metrics. For instance, time spent on page and click-through rate. The more time people spend on your page, the better your search intent alignment is. The same goes for the click-through rate. If no one clicks on your content or if some people do but they get out of Dodge in a split second, you’ll rank lower.
Allow me to demonstrate.
Have you ever felt really, really hungry? I’m sure you have. When I get to that point, there’s no reasoning with me. It’s food now or prepare for the apocalypse.
So what do you do when you’re too hungry to wait for food delivery? You cook a quick dinner based on the ingredients you have in your home.
But you start with a (quick!) Google search.
Now Google made it easy for you to sift through results. Some of these nifty boxes have time stamps. But the time varies widely.
Since I’m hungry NOW, I’ll skip past the 45-minute recipes (it’s an emergency, not a Masterchef selection) and go to the 15-minute one. Yes, 15 minutes sound bearable — maybe I can even bring it down to 13 if I pre-heat my skillet.
If more users think like me when the 45-minute recipes will rank lower and lower. The 15-minute honey garlic chicken will eventually take the crown.
Of course, hunger it’s not the only factor. Perhaps it is for me, but not for Google.
Perhaps the collection of recipes ranks higher right now because a lot of people do meal prepping. So they prefer to sift through more recipes until they find one that appeals to their palate.
But I digress.
My point is that the better your user intent alignment, the better your chances to rank high in SERPs.
Still, quantity isn’t everything — you should be aiming for quality with your traffic. So let’s see how search intent factors into that.
We’ve already established that traffic doesn’t pay for your staff or for your quick chicken dinner. Not by itself.
However, if you attract the right traffic, you can pay for everything you need to pay.
If you consider user intent from the very beginning, this is exactly what you’ll get: visits from people who are ready to buy from you.
Let’s say you finished your quick chicken dinner and you’re in the mood for something sweet. But since you’ve already had something to eat, you’re not in such a hurry anymore. You can wait for it to be delivered.
You turn to Google again:
Yikes! Recipes again? No, you’re done cooking for tonight.
You need to change your query.
That’s more like it! (In the actual results, you’ll also see a map with the bakeries that are closer to you. It’s hidden here for privacy reasons, but if anyone feels like delivering a cake to my address, I’m happy to share it with you.)
What’s the lesson here?
If you own a bakery shop, trying to rank for “chocolate cake” will be expensive, time-sucking, and, most of all, irrelevant. You don’t know what the user actually wants when they search for “chocolate cake”. Google assumes it’s a recipe, but that may be based on my search history — you know, the chicken story.
However, if you optimize your content for “chocolate cake delivery” (+ your area) it’s easier, faster, better aligned with search intent, cheaper and, most of all, effective for your business goals. People who search for “delivery” next to their “chocolate cake” are ready to buy. And you’re ready to sell — what a lovely coincidence, right?
Now let’s make sure we get past the coincidence stage. If you understand user intent well, you can optimize your content for it, rank higher, and sell more.
In broad terms, there are four types of user intent. A user may start with the first of them and work their way up to the last. Or start in the middle and stay there for a while. Or skip right to the last one. It all depends on where in the buyer’s journey they are.
Here they are:
As the name suggests, the user is looking for information. They’re not ready to buy yet. An example (I’ll be moving away from food-related examples before this article starts ranking better than allrecipes.com):
I searched for “windows”. Because Google knows that most people are looking for the operating system and not house windows, what I see on the first page is only Microsoft-related. The results speak for themselves: the official website that urges me to “explore” the latest version, a few similar results and the Wikipedia page in case my need for information includes the operating system’s history.
Pro tip: if you’re in an industry where education is needed, informational search intent is the way to start your funnel. Cybersecurity is a good example here: you need to educate your readers on cyber threats before selling them your security solution.
This type of search intent includes people looking for a specific website. Perhaps they don’t know the exact name or they don’t know if it ends with .com, .org, or something else. Or perhaps they are too lazy to type in the whole name and let Google do the work for them:
Here we are navigational intent with a hint of information. But navigational first and foremost as you can see from the login option displayed as the very second result — just in case you need to see your dashboard quickly. You do have other options, too, like looking at our G2 reviews, just in case you were doing a quick background check and looking for an independent, third-party opinion before subscribing.
Pro tip: make sure your website ranks for your company name. This should be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many company websites don’t rank for their own name, especially if said name is a common noun or if there is more than one company with the same or similar name.
This is where the fun begins. This type of query is used by people who plan to buy in the near future. They’re past the “identifying a need” stage. They already know they need something.
Now they are on to researching that something. I’m researching running shoes at the moment (too much chocolate cake will get you there):
I even clicked on an answer box with a list of running shoes to check out what’s out there. It will take some fidgeting and some more research but I’ll find the best pair of shoes eventually.
Pro tip: Top X items articles will get you under the eyes of people with commercial intent. For eCommerce, it can be a goldmine. You can create articles on top pet food brands, top accessories for spring, top…anything. Then link to the products you sell and voila…you’ve added SEO juice to your product pages and even made a sale or two from a single article.
This is the end of our journey. After a lot of research, I know what I want and I am ready to buy. I find the right pair of shoes.
Google knows that, if I bother to write an entire product name, I’m probably ready to buy. So what I see first are shopping ads. If I wasn’t ready to buy, I’d probably be looking for “Nike Air Zoom Pegasus reviews” just to see if they are worth their salt.
Pro tip: Make sure the names of your products appear on all your product pages. Add words like “buy”, “discount”, “sale”, “offer”, and more, especially if you’re running a promotion. This will help you rank higher and bring you the right traffic — that’s people waving their credit cards and ready to buy in this case.
As with any kind of marketing strategy, you need to start by going back to your buyer persona to understand their needs and how they search.
Pro tip: integrating your mission-critical solutions, like your CRM/ERP and your email marketing solutions can give you unparalleled insights into your customers’ minds. Take a look at how one of our subscribers uses Mailchimp for NetSuite to understand their customers’ journey better and then sell more.
As soon as you’ve got that covered, you need to come up with the right content. Here are a few quick tricks:
Leveraging search intent ultimately boils up to getting to know your buyer persona, their needs, their habits. If they like your content, search engines will like it too.
More importantly, creating content that answers real needs is the best way to rank higher and get relevant traffic. If you’ve got this far, you might have noticed that there is far more in this piece about how users search and why than about what Google wants. This is the core of search intent: going back to the user and their needs instead of trying to please a machine-based overlord.
