If you have your own website, your goal is probably to attract as many visitors as possible, regardless of what you are selling or the service your company offers. And optimizing the keywords on your site, otherwise known as SEO, is an important step to ensure you attract traffic to your site. However, understanding search intent is also important too, as explained here.
What is Search Intent?
In recent years, Google has become a lot more accurate in figuring out the search intent of those searching online; in other words, why they are searching? It may be because they are trying to find a particular website, they may be looking for information or trying to find a service, or they may want to purchase something. Ensuring that your website meets the intent of your audience is important, as Google wants to take into account the search intent, as well as giving a higher rank to pages that best match the search terms.
There are several different types of search intent:
If you are looking for information on a specific topic, you are carrying out informational intent, whether you are looking for information on raising children, what the weather will be like on your trip, or anything else.
However, if you type the term ‘Facebook’ into the search box, you are probably looking for the Facebook site specifically, and that is known as navigational intent. If your website is the one that Internet users are actually looking for, your site can achieve a high ranking, otherwise, this type of search won’t really help you.
You have transactional intent if you are surfing the Web in order to buy something, perhaps comparing prices on several different sites. And you have a commercial investigating intent if you plan to buy something in the foreseeable future, and are doing some research ahead of time. You may be looking up information on washing machines to help you to decide which is the best buy.
You are probably going to buy something if you type in the words ‘discount’ or ‘special offer’ and the words you type in the search engine box can give clues as to whether you intend to buy, are comparison shopping or doing preliminary research.
Optimizing Content For Search Intent
If a potential customer is looking to buy your product, they probably aren’t interested in reading a lot of text, meaning that it’s important to make sure your website’s landing page matches your audience’s search intent.
Asking your audience exactly what they are looking for is one of the easiest and most effective ways of figuring out search intent, as it isn’t always easy to determine exactly what someone is looking for online. You can get useful information from visitors to your site by creating a brief survey that pops up on the screen when they use your site, or upon leaving the page and you have probably come across these yourself.
Matching the search intent of your audience can be a challenge, but as can be seen, it is as important as coming up with the right keywords to match searches.