An area of SEO that’s been gaining traction of late has been around search intent – understanding the reasoning behind the term that people are using to find your website, product, or service. But what exactly is it and why is it important?
Broadly speaking, people search for five key reasons:
- Information: They want to learn about something.
- Commercial: They want to buy/ transact in some way.
- Comparison: They want to compare several products or services.
- Navigation: They want to find somewhere.
- Brand: They’re looking for a specific brand.
People searching for these kinds of terms must be given the right content and the right experience, otherwise, they’ll be much less likely to click or take the action we want them to. People searching for a specific piece of information, such as asking a question, for example, don’t want to be given the hard sell with a commercial page, and the homepage is unlikely to give them the right experience, so it’s important to take this targeting into account.
By ensuring that the right content is targeting the right kind of keywords and that the landing pages are providing the optimal experience for these users, you have a much stronger opportunity to drive more people into your sales funnel as well as to build brand advocacy. But this goes beyond SEO in isolation.
All Response Media viewpoint
At All Response Media, intent analysis is built into every part of our SEO and CRO processes using a customised machine learning model, ensuring that every user is given the appropriate experience. We are marketing in the age of personalisation, and users have less tolerance for poor experiences than ever, so the intent must be considered when creating and optimising content and landing pages.
It’s also vital that this intent is carried over into other channels. It can, for example, be used for the most common searches from a TV campaign, or the different search engines used, and so on. Ultimately, people are unique and so are their searches, so the experiences they receive from your site must be tailored to this. Intent analysis won’t do all of this for you, but it’s a great place to start.
Read more information on our digital services.