What Is Search Intent?
Search Intent is the overarching goal or purpose of your organic search engine optimization (SOE) strategy. What is your end goal concerning attracting organic traffic to your site? Is it to increase web traffic, lead generation, or sales?
This is an important question because it dictates the metrics you should focus on. Are you trying to grow your blog for entertainment purposes? To promote your personal brand online? To generate leads for your product or service?
You can’t optimize your blog or website for all three without first establishing your Intent. Your intent should be carefully chosen and reflect the action you want to see from your campaign. For example, if you want to grow your blog to become a fully functioning online magazine, you might want to target the word “blog” in your search intent. This tells the search engine that your site is a blog and that you want to use it to gain more readers.
On the flip side, if you’re looking to promote your product or service, you might want to target the word “product” or “service” in your search intent. This will help search engines find your content more readily available to potential customers.
Establishing your search intent is about making it abundantly clear to yourself and others what your goal and objectives are regarding your organic marketing strategy. Just because your site or blog doesn’t yet exist doesn’t mean you can’t start generating organic search traffic immediately.
If you’re just getting started, take some time to think of some keywords and phrases that accurately describe your product or service. Using these phrases in your content and throughout your site’s architecture will help guide potential customers to your product or service when searching for answers.
Most businesses, big and small, have a bit of an urban legend surrounding them. Something like: “If you build it, they will come.” While that may be true in the case of small, independent businesses, the reality is a bit more complex when it comes to attracting customers to your big-box store.
Regarding e-commerce, “they will come” can be replaced with “they will click.”
Why? Because as we’ve established above, most people don’t enter a brick-and-mortar store. They find the product they want online and then order it. So if you want to expand your sales funnel and make more money, you need to figure out a way to get more people to click.
The question is: how?
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Focus On The Basics
As we’ve established, people don’t usually come into a store; they click online. A perfectly designed store with all the bells and whistles doesn’t mean a thing if the experience is terrible. It could drive away more customers than you have now. Why? Because they won’t feel welcome, and you’ll never know if a customer feels welcome or not.
You need to understand what makes your store special. What makes you different from any other online store? What makes you stand out among the sea of competitors?
If you don’t know the answer to these questions, it’s time to find out. Take some time to sit down and think about why you’re special. Then, work with a product specialist to put together a plan. Basic SEO will also greatly help, as it will put some basic email marketing. With these things in place, you’ll be able to track the number of visitors to your site, and from there, you can establish how you’re doing and what you need to focus on moving forward.
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Create A Community
You’ve established yourself as the go-to store for whatever a customer may need. Now, you want to prove to them that they made the right choice in buying from you. Prove to them that you’re the best, and keep them coming back for more.
The easiest way to do this is to create a community. When you have a community, you have a base of engaged individuals with something to offer each other. They’ll keep coming back because they know they can trust you, and you’ll keep exceeding their expectations because you understand what they want and need. You don’t need an engaged community to have an excellent SEO strategy; you need an excellent SEO strategy to have an engaged community. It’s about time you realized that the two are not mutually exclusive.
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Provide Quality Content
If someone decides to visit your site after performing a search, you’ve officially captured the consumer’s attention. Now, you need to make sure they stay. How? By putting out quality content. When customers find your blog post or product review relevant and of good quality, they’ll feel assured that they’re making the right choice in spending their money with you.
In a nutshell, quality content drives quality traffic and, eventually, sales. Quality content is the perfect place to start if you want to improve your conversion rate.
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Personalized Marketing
Depending on how much you charge for an ordered product, you may or may not be able to offer personalized marketing. That is the ability to send a specific message to each individual customer. For instance, you may choose to promote a special offer for a customer who ordered at a certain price point.
When you combine personalized marketing with content strategy, you have an opportunity to connect with your customers. When a company gets too bogged down in the mundane, they forget what made them special in the first place. As cliche as it may sound, the little things make a difference. That is the ability to personalize user experience, content, and marketing completely. Don’t forget: your customers are humans too.
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Local SEO
Google Search determines your site to be popular based on the number of people searching for your products or services. However, if you want to find your customers in the neighborhood, there’s another way. You can do this through local SEO. The idea here is to focus on getting your site “liked” by the people who live in your area. When Google finds that you’re offering value and quality within a specified location, it will display your website higher in the search results.
This is a great way to capture potential customers who may not have even known your business exists. In other words, you’re not just competing for online customers but also the locals.
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Product Review Blogging
Last but not least, we have product review blogging. If someone is reading reviews for a water filter, and one of the reviews is from your store, they may very well decide to purchase that product. Why? Because they’ve seen your honest review and know that you’re not going to steer them wrong. In other words, you’re an expert in your field and know what you’re talking about.
This strategy allows you to establish credibility and build trust with prospective customers. When someone decides to purchase a product or service based on your review, it shows that you’re not just another online store. You’re an expert with something valuable to share about this particular product or service. Of course, you’ll need to keep in mind the niche or specific topic of your product reviews. If you try to cover too much ground, you’ll lose credibility.
Why Is It Important To Maximize Your Search Intent
You make a search query on Google, and in a matter of seconds, you see hundreds, if not thousands, of results that are perfectly relevant to your search terms. You scroll down the page and notice a few other results at the top. To your dismay, they seem completely off-topic and, in some cases, even slightly insulting.
You keep scrolling down and down and eventually find a decent amount of results, but just barely. You’ve hit the maximum amount of entries that the search engine has deemed satisfactory for your query. You’re not quite satisfied with this result, so you keep adjusting your search terms and hitting the search button repeatedly, hoping for a better score. In the end, you give up and think, “Well, it was a nice try, but at this point, I’m not sure what I’m looking for.”
This is what Google optimizes for. This is what they’re passionate about. They want to provide the best possible results for your search query, but only so long as you keep feeding them new content to process. Ultimately, they want to serve you as relevant content as possible to your search queries. Maximizing your Search Intent is essential to becoming a prominent organic search optimizer.
You should care about search intent for a few reasons. First off, it can help you define your overall strategy. By answering the question, “What do I want to achieve with my blog?” you can choose an SEO strategy that is most suitable for your needs. Let’s say you decide to grow your blog as an online magazine. In this case, you will want to target the keyword “blog” in your search intent. This will help you establish yourself as an authority in your field and make it easier for people to find you when searching for content like yours.
Depending on the size of your blog or website, you may want to choose one of the following SEO strategies:
- Focus on page content (articles, videos, and so on)
- Focus on link building
- Focus on social media
- Do all of the above
Once you’ve decided which SEO strategy you want to pursue, you can start developing a plan to make it happen. Tons of free tools and apps can help you develop and monitor your SEO strategy. For example, Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush.
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The Importance Of Relevance
Google recognizes that not all relevant content is created equal. While there is ample opportunity to optimize the search results for your target keywords, there is also the chance that you are trying to promote a brand or product that is completely irrelevant to your niche and even the general public.
This is why it’s important to try and maximize your search intent. If you want to become a prominent SEO expert, you must prove that you are as or more relevant than the rest of the competition. To maximize your search intent and gain credibility with search engines, you must make sure that your content and the information you provide is as accurate as possible. When people click on these organic results, they expect to see as relevant content as possible. To best satisfy your users and maintain a good reputation with search engines, you should:
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- Use reputable sources.
- Be the best in your field.
- Write for a general audience.
- Make sure your content is original and unique.
- Be consistently engaging.
- Make sure that your content is relevant to your target keywords and phrases.
- Include your target keywords and phrases fairly frequently across all elements of your content (title, body, metadata)
- Use various forms of media to reach a wide audience (e.g., video content)
- Include calls to action throughout your content (e.g., “click here”)
To take this a step further, you can also use SEO tools to help you analyze your blog or website content to determine its relevancy to potential customers. For example, you can use the free Google Keyword Planner to search for your target keywords and see how frequently you are (or aren’t) already using them. The more you use these tools and keep track of the results, the better your chances of becoming an SEO expert.
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Longer Content
With increasing content being created and published online daily, ensuring that your content is as long as possible is becoming more important than ever. While it’s great to have a long blog post that provides valuable information, search engines don’t always favor longer content – especially if it’s just pure “blah, blah, blah.” To outrank shorter content, you need to add value and make sure that your readers stay engaged
One method of doing this is regularly posting shorter snippets of content called “bullet points.” Having several articles with short content on your blog can help drive traffic to your site while also satisfying your audience, who want fast, easy-to-digest information.
Since shorter content (such as a bulleted list) is easier to consume in smaller bites, you can bet that many of your readers will be happy to help you serve them content that is as short and sweet as possible.
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Local Search
If your blog or website is geo-targeted, you can choose to include local search in your SEO strategy. This involves using keywords and phrases related to local areas, events, and businesses. You might also want to include the city name in the mix. This will help search engines determine your site’s relevance to that location. By including your city and zipcode in your local search, you can ensure that you are reaching the right audience.
Start Maximizing Your Search Intent
You have a product or service that people want but cannot find. Or, they find it but don’t convert it to a sale as easily as you’d like. What can you do?
You can improve your conversion rate by optimizing your search intent. That means ensuring that Google understands what you’re looking for and provides the best possible results for that search.
