Everyone wants more SEO traffic, and ranking in search-driven results is one of the strongest ways to grow your site’s authority online. Actually getting your site to show up in search engine results pages is another story entirely.
The key to optimizing your search prevalence is to not only consider what keywords your target audience uses but also the intent of each search. Everyone online is looking to find out something, whether it’s the location of a local business or a how-to guide.
By taking your audience’s intent into account, you’ll be able to strengthen your SEO by reaching potential customers exactly where they’re at through high-ranking, valuable content.
Tailor Your Message to Your Audience’s Purpose
There are different types of intent that people have online, and each one affects the type of content you produce and how its presented. The four major types of searches people conduct are:
- Informational: they want to learn something.
- Commercial: they are considering making a purchase and want to learn more about their options, e.g. “the top smart speakers of 2020.”
- Navigational: they’re looking for something, e.g. typing in Macy’s to be directed to the Macy’s store website.
- Transactional: they want to buy something and are looking for a specific type of product.
By concentrating on what your target audience actually hopes to achieve, you’ll be able to optimize your keyword strategy with more direct, influential keywords.
Intent SEO allows you to grow your business’s revenue and consistently outrank the competition; your content will feel more deliberate, accurate, and aligned with consumers’ needs.
Optimize Your Pages for Intent Searches
All of your products on the same page can result in lower results. While you may allow customers to browse your collective wares, there should also be individual pages designed to help search engines find your site more easily.
For example, imagine that you sell fitness equipment online. While it might be useful to have everything available in one place, it could boost your search traffic tremendously if you started to break up content into pages that are optimized for keywords like “the best home treadmills” or “how to build a home gym.”
It’s possible to optimize a site for multiple types of search intent, which allows you to meet buyers at different stages of the sales funnel. Depending on where they are in the pipeline, you can produce content that provides a solution and encourages them to take the next step in the buyer’s journey.
Use Surveys to Improve Your Keywords and Meta Data
The best way to learn what your audience thinks is to ask them directly. When someone makes a purchase or signs up for an email list, send a short survey asking them how they found your site and what keywords they used.
You can even make an optional pop-up survey that prompts users to fill you in on how they found you and what they were looking for. If you ever find that it’s difficult to get viewers to participate, consider incentivizing your on-site surveys.
For example, a pop-up might ask viewers to answer a few short questions in order to receive a discount code or free downloadable based on the information they’ve searched.
After you have a better understanding of what searches brought users to your site, you can refine your on-page and meta SEO to improve your ranking.
