SEO is a great way to bring more traffic to our website, the higher up we sit in Google’s rankings.
What is search intent?
As you’ll have guessed, search intent gives us a picture of how users behave on the internet and of what they search for.
- What are they looking for?
- Why are they looking for it?
- What do they want to buy?
- What do they want to know?
By now Google is perfectly capable of taking these search intents into account and ranking the web pages that best answer them.
The four types of search intent
A need for information
It’s worth knowing that a large part of the population uses the internet for information.
To find out what the weather will be like, what’s happening around them, about education, even about SEO.
There’s not much to say about these users: their searches are very specific and concrete.
Buying and selling!
More and more people use the internet to carry out transactions: buying, selling, hunting for the best price.
These kinds of searches are very clear and matter a great deal to Google.
Money talks.
Let’s navigate
In this group we have everyone who searches the internet but with one specific destination in mind.
Ranking well is only useful for your organic traffic if your website is the one users are actually looking for.
What’s new in the shops?
Finally we have the searches of the window shopper.
The person who wants to buy something in the future, or who simply browses the web daydreaming about buying things.
Conclusions
From these points the information we want to know about users emerges easily enough.
If we know what we have and what we do as an organisation, what we need to work out now is how users and customers are going to look for us.
With a good deal of empathy and intuition, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of those trying to find us.
What search intent they’ll show, what words they’ll use to look for us and how they’ll write them.
Once we’ve analysed that and have the answer, all that’s left is to optimise our web content so Google can connect it to users’ search intent.
Every piece of content on our website can be optimised.
But we mustn’t lose our heads: the content also has to appeal to the user, or it’s straight out the door or window!
