Optimize Your Content for Search Intent

One of the most common way to get organic traffic to your website is doing SEO. This helps you to rank high in Google and attract relevant people to your site.

But to get even more traffic, you need to optimize content for the keywords that people use to search for their desired content.

Adding your target keywords into your content is not enough. You must provide valuable information relevant to those keywords. Your content should match the search intent of the users.

Related: Google Voice Search: How to Optimize Your Content for the Voice Search?

What is Search Intent?

Search intent (user intent or keyword intent) is the reason for which someone uses a search engine.

Search intent is the purpose or goal which the user wants to achieve by inserting their query in the search box. Everyone does an online search with the aim to find something.

It can be a search for a product, or the intent to learn something new. There are even times when people are only looking for a link to a particular website.

Why Search Intent is Important?

If you can understand the user intent for a specific query, you have more possibility for ranking on that keyword than other available content in the search result page.

Align yourself with Google’s mission statement, that is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

For the attainment of this sole purpose, they always come up with new core algorithm updates like “Hummingbird“, “RankBrain“, and recently “Bert” to understand search intent in a better way.

It is clear from their side if you want to rank higher, think about users, give them the best content by interpreting their intent behind their query.

If you want to rank your website you need to optimize your content depending on the search intent of users.

Your content helps your site rank in search results, and it drives relevant traffic to your site. For that, you just need to create relevant quality content based on a deep understanding of user search intent.

Related: How the Search Engine Giant, Mr Google Works?

Establish Your Brand

In this competitive digital age having your brand is a must, to stand out.  It makes people aware of your business and builds trust among them.

When your content matches users’ search intent, they spend more time on your page and become familiar with your business to learn about your product and services.

Branding can also help a business get word-of-mouth referrals. The common thing among all successful businesses is that they all established themselves as a leader in their particular industry by building trust and authority among their customers.

Now, most of the users are trusting websites that have a brand reputation on the internet. For instance on someone searches for “what is digital marketing” and Google shows results by evaluating various ranking factors. your website is in 5th position in SERP.

But people who are familiar with your website and had previous positive experiences with your website. Then odds are they will skip the top results and click on your site for getting information.

This behavior treated by google as user signal which helps your website future ranking.

Related: How Can SEO Help You Build Your Brand in 2020?

Need for Content Optimization

The answer is simple, if you create content that is optimized for search intent, that inevitably brings quality traffic to your site, quality traffic means increased conversion, and I think having an improved conversion rate is the goal of every business.

It is a win-win game for everyone whether it is a search engine, users, or your website.

If you follow these steps, it will help you to build authority and trust in the eyes of Google and your users, that is what puts you ahead of your competitors.

Related: How to Write High-Quality Content?

You can see clearly in this graph how a higher ranking in Google SERP correlates with an increased click-through rate. Look at the big difference between the first and second results, that difference is getting bigger for the rest of the below results.

How to Interpret Search Intent

Search intent can be easily understood just by looking at the keywords of the users, for example, if the phrase contains words like How, What, and Why then you can easily categorize it into informational intent. You can further categorize search intent by looking at the table below.

Types of Search Intent

Navigational Search Intent

A navigational query is a search done by the user to find out the specific website in search engines. This means while doing their search they are very clear where they need to go without scrolling all the result pages. 

People are aware of your brand, they don’t insert the complete URL of your site to find you, they just reach your site through your brand name, which you have built overtime on the internet.

Here are a few examples of navigational search intent:

• Amazon
• Facebook
• Hubspot on marketing
• Apple iPhone

You can understand this by the example given below. I searched for the keyword “Apple iPhone” and Google is showing exactly what I wanted to see.

Informational Search Intent

Informational Search Intent is where users search for information or answers to their questions. For example, it could be “How to lose weight?”. Basically, they want an in-depth article which covers all the major points that can solve their problem or educate them on the topic

Studies showed that more than 80% of the search done on search engines come from informational searches.

which means they possess a very big opportunity for you to create content for that type of intent to rank higher.

Here are a few examples of informational search intent:

• What’s a good conversion rate?
• What’s a great backlink strategy?
• How to make a cake?
• How to learn a programming language?

Let’s look at the given example to understand Informational Search Intent.

In order to boost your page and content for informational intent,  use the question words like how, what in your headings, subheadings, URL, page title, and descriptions.

Provide the answer to the user’s query in the first paragraph, so that the reader can quickly see that you’re the right match and will continue to click through the article.

Content types best suited to informational intent are blog posts and articles, how-to guides, list posts, and step-by-step posts, as well as how-to videos.

Commercial Search Intent

Commercial Search Intent is, when the user knows what he wants to buy, but wants to compare different brands. It is the phase before the transaction process. The main reason behind this search is to find different available options that match their needs.

Here are a few examples of commercial search intent:

• Best smartphones under 10k
• MacBook vs windows which one is better
• Best digital marketing institute
• Best investment options

Frequently used keywords in Commercial Search Intent:

• Buy
• Coupon
• Discount
• Review
• Best
• Top 10
• Affordable

If a person wants to buy an smartphone, he will search for the “Best smartphones under 10k”.

He will get a number of options to compare the product by quality and price. This also provides him the review of the product by other buyers.

To rank well in these searches, including detailed product and service descriptions for your particular product.

You can also create a blog for the product or service that you provide. In that, you can have a comparison of your product or service with your competitors. Here, you can also mention the benefit of products for others.

Using words such as best, top, review and using descriptive language in blog posts, reviews, and roundups of products/services and on the landing page will boost your page and content optimization

Transactional Search Intent

The term is self-explanatory in itself, here the user has a mindset to make a purchase related to the product or service, they are clear about what they want to buy.

Here are a few examples of transactional search intent:

• Buy a new car
• Tickets for a cricket match
• Discount on winter wear

Frequently used keywords in Commercial Search Intent:

• Buy
• Coupon
• Order
• Purchase 

In the image, you can see that the user is very clear with the idea of what product he wants to buy. He has made the search to find the best place to buy the desired product.

How to Use Ahrefs to Find Keywords for Specific Intent?

Ahrefs is a well-known tool used for backlinks and SEO analysis. There are a number of ways Ahrefs can help you to boost your SEO or marketing efforts.

With Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, you can use modifiers to filter for keywords with specific intent when doing keyword research.

In this example, I am going to use “content marketing” keyword in ahrefs keywords explorer.

Then for getting relevant informational keywords for blog post, I’ll choose “Having same terms ” report from the left-hand menu to see some keyword ideas.

Then, copy and paste the modifier word into the “Include” box and switch the toggle to “Any word”.

After clicking on the apply button, we got all the keywords ideas containing the question word “How”. Now we can plan our content based on these keywords search volume and difficulty metric.

Best Practices to Optimize Content for Search Intent

Target Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are those keywords that contain more than 3 words in the search query they are low in competition with less search volume.

And it’s become more important for webmasters due to the popularity of voice search.

They are very significant from an SEO perspective if you want to rank for specific long-tail keywords. In long-tail keywords, searcher intent is more specific for example, if someone searches for “shoes” in the search box.

Then the searcher could have multiple intents like he may want to know about the shoes, or he wants to compare shoes or want to buy new shoes.

But from the search engine and webmaster’s perspective, it’s quite ambiguous to infer the intent from this single keyword.

But when it comes to long-tail keywords they have odds of high conversion rate that’s why they are an important part of effective SEO strategy.

Researching long-tail keywords and using them on your website, increases the volume of related organic queries you rank for.

For example, when a user searches for “best android phone under Rs15000” or “Latest Samsung phone”, this shows that he is willing to purchase an android phone.

If you are a phone retailer or wholesaler, you will definitely get a high click through rate for that keyword.

Write Effective Meta Descriptions

The meta description is an HTML attribute that briefly explains about the content on the web. This is read by search engine bots to know about webpage content and is shown on the search result page.

Here is the example of well written meta description that is intriguing enough to push user to click on the link.

A well-written meta description drives traffic to your website and increases your click-through rate. Tell the users clearly why they should click on your webpage link.

Implement Structured Data

Structured data is a way to structure your webpage content so that search engines can understand your content in a better way and show it in SERP with rich results which ultimately helps users to know more about the webpage and influence your CTR.

There is a markup language format known as schema markup which is accepted by all the major search engines like google, bing, yahoo etc.

In this example I searched for the keyword “biscuit recipe“. Google will show relevant results with added reviews and ratings which give the impression of trust to the user and helps in improved CTR.

Create Posts With Images

Posts with images result in an increased click-through rate because they are easy to digest and has a high possibility to go viral.

Social media posts are great example of that everyone is just binging on them.

Instead of having a long description in text form, if you use a perfect image to define your product quality; you will definitely get a positive response from your viewers.

Simplify Your Page Heading

The HTML H1 tag is the first header tag visible on a page. It is used for the title of a page.

The title of your page is the first thing that comes into the sight of your user. A simple title with words matching the Search Intent of users gives a high click-through rate.

Establishing E-A-T Principles

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. These are three factors that Google uses to measure the credibility of a website. Google wants to give its customers the best possible experience.

Domains and businesses which offer Expertise, Authority, and Trust are promoted by Google.

Let’s discuss these three of them detail.

Expertise

Expertise means expert skill or knowledge in a particular field. If you offer a service or product in which you have deep knowledge about it. Then you could be classified as an expert in that field — especially if you can demonstrate your knowledge level which matches or exceeds your competitor.

Authority

Authority is built by showing expertise both are interrelated if you add value through your content consistently to your users then Google will consider you as being a trusted, accurate, true, and reliable resource.

As “expertise” is a measurement of knowledge or skill level, authority is measured to see how well you, your brand or business, or your website and the content within it stand apart from the other options.

When people search the internet, they’re looking for an authority who can give them answers they can trust. They not only want to trust the expertise of these people or brands, but they also want to be sure that they’re the best person to go if they want to about a certain topic

Google will scrutinize your website, and your content to determine if it is not only expertly written content.

Trust

Trust is both emotional and logical, logically, it is where you assess the probabilities and calculate expected utility based on previous experience, and conclude that the person will behave in a predictable manner.

So in terms of SEO perspective, It is the measurement of how much credence your brand, website, or content has in the eyes of the user.

It’s one thing to create a lot of content that out there on the internet in abundance, but it’s another thing to be trustworthy.

Best Practices to Follow E-A-T Guidelines

Write High-quality Content

The speed at which search engines assess and categorize the new content of a website is the most important thing after the advent of mobile-first indexing it becomes more accelerated.

That puts a greater impact on demonstrating expertise, authority, and trust. The SERP (search engine results page) is basically the finished product that search engines offer.

This means they are always looking to produce the best results that will completely satisfy user intent. A search engine will extract the meaning of your content when presented with a query.

This allows them to determine whether your website has the ability to provide an adequate solution.

The average word count on top ranking sites has grown to a little less than 2000 words.

Use Keyword Clusters to Demonstrate Expertise.

The first and the most important part of keyword research is listing your keyword idea buckets. This will allow you to group the topics that are strongly associated with your keyword.

Highlight  the main keywords that represent your products or services.

Keywords used to connect ideas and signal the importance of that phrase to your content.

And the concept of keyword clustering shows search engines how much knowledge you have about a certain topic.

The widespread coverage of related topics contributes to demonstrating expert opinion.

Create Depth in Your Keyword Topic

The aim of  keyword clustering is to publish content that further explains the subtopics used in your main keyword topic.

In addition to publishing a page on a topic, you would also need to publish content that goes deeper into detail.

Focus the main part of your article this allows you to target highly specific search terms.

These articles will ultimately send visitors to your service page.

Your website will be displayed in a search result based on the expertise of your content.

Organize  your site using keyword clusters to create depth and expertise in your keyword topics.

The clear understanding of user intent is must for sustainable growth of your business.

This will not only keep you ahead of your competitors but also provide you scope of self-growth as a business.

Matching your content as per the need of your user is the key factor which will lead your business to the height of success. 

Conclusion

Showing results as per user’s search intent is Google’s top priority, and if you want your website to rank on Google for your target keywords then you need to structure your content as per search intent.

If your online content doesn’t provide answers to the questions of users searching for, then it will become hard for your website to rank high on Google.