A Handy Guide On What Is Search Intent for SEO (Updated)

Searches are happening online daily, and marketers are striving hard to rank on top, but at times putting all these efforts becomes futile if it doesn’t yield the desired result. Have you faced such a situation or are struggling with it? Then, you might have to consider the search intent of your page to rank higher on search results.

If you are a newbie in the SEO world, you might ask what is search intent. Or if you have been around for a long time, it can raise questions like, can search intent really make a difference?

This blog is the answer to all those questions, and reading the blog till the very end, you will have a clear idea on: 

• What Is Search Intent?
• Why Is Search Intent Important?
• What Are The Different Types Of Search Intent?
• How To Optimize Your Content For Search Intent?

So, let’s directly get into it!

What Is Search Intent?

Search intent, also known as user intent, is understanding the goal behind a user’s search term. It clearly states why the search happened and what the user is looking for.  For example, if someone is searching “coffee addiction,” here the user is looking for more information instead of buying or purchasing any coffee products. 

Google has also adapted the algorithm to understand the user’s intent, providing the most relevant and quality content ranking at the top. It’s like when you ask a question in person, the primary intention is to get the answer you need. Similarly, while asking questions on a search engine, you need exact answers.

Why Is Search Intent Important?

Search engines like Google put a lot of effort into understanding the search intent and ranking pages that perfectly fit according to what the user is looking for.

One of the primary goals for Google is to satisfy the search intent. It may even happen that a user searches for a specific term and gets irrelevant information, it can indicate to Google the content is not satisfactory and doesn’t match the search intent.

Google has a dedicated section on user intent and how to identify different intent in their search quality evaluator guidelines. Putting search intent first in your SEO framework can play a key role in maximizing your efforts.

Here are our top 3 reasons why search intent is important:  

1.  Create relevant content: You can build content marketing strategies and align your content efforts to match what the user is looking for, rather than shooting in the dark.

2. Rank on top in the search engines: If your content provides a complete solution to what the user is looking for, then without a doubt, you will rank higher.

3. Build brand authority and trust: Sharing timely and relevant content improves your brand authority in the eyes of search engines.

What are the different types of search intent?

Understanding the different types of search intent will help you develop content as per the nature of a particular keyword.  Generally,  there are four types of search intent: Informational Intent, Navigational Intent, Transactional Intent, and Commercial Intent.

Let’s know about each one of them in detail.

Informational Intent

✔️A user is seeking information in this type of search intent.

The user might be searching using a specific question or just listing down their concerns to read and learn more about the topic. Here the user is not looking to buy or purchase any product or service.

Here the query clearly shows that the user is looking to learn about caffeine. The intent is not to buy a product or be a part of a health club. This informational intent is most commonly searched by people among Google results, and at times users also search for specific questions.

Navigational Intent

✔️A user is looking to navigate to a particular page.

Here the users are searching for a specific URL and want to navigate there. The user is well aware of the website but doesn’t have the exact URL to directly reach the site.  The search results are general links to those URLs. As seen in the below example.

Transactional Intent

✔️A user is looking to make a purchase.

In keywords with transactional intent, the user is ready to make a purchase. They have passed the awareness and discovery stage of the buying cycle.

They know the product they want; they are just looking for brands that can perfectly match their requirements. It is generally very easy to identify transactional intent searches as they have the words like buy or shop in them.

 

 

Also, if a user doesn’t include any such words as buy or shop but if it includes white sneakers the Google algorithm is smart enough to understand intent and rank results accordingly. Sometimes, Google also shows rich snippets with additional information to satisfy the user intent behind the search.

 

Commercial Intent

✔️A user is looking for options before making a purchase. 

Before making a purchase, the users cut down their choices and look at the available options in the market. They mainly include terms such as “best”, and “top” which are commercial search queries. The users can move ahead after reviewing the products or services they opt to purchase.

 

 

The searchers using commercial intent are in the middle of the sales funnel. They know that they will purchase the product soon, but they are looking to make the right decision.

Each keyword plays a distinct role in the buyer journey. Once you have understood the user intent, you can know where they are in the sales funnel and work around your content strategy accordingly. We love this breakdown by Semrush. It pretty much explains the whole point. 

 

How To Optimize Your Content For Search Intent?

As we discussed earlier, the main goal of SEO is to rank higher and bring relevant traffic to your site. With the proper understanding of user intent for SEO, you can optimize your content better to convert the traffic into quality conversions.

Here are the actionable steps you can take to optimize your content keeping the search intent in mind.

Think Like A User

By now, we are clear that every search has a specific intent. Try to study the search intent and build your content strategy around it carefully.

Manually understanding a particular keyword intent can be difficult, as there are many factors involved in this process. But thanks to tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, you can get to know the keyword intent without much ado.

Source: Semrush

After understanding the keyword intent, it is a good practice to look at the type of content ranking on Google for a particular keyword. The search results are like an indicator of what kind of content the user likes. This will help you build your strategy accordingly.

Try to fill in the content gap to help to match the users’ search query for a particular keyword. The key to optimizing for user intent is to ensure you are using the most appropriate tools that can help you exact the much-needed information. Here are some of our recommendations:

• Use tools such as Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics (Conduct a study of impressions, clicks, click-through rates, and more)
• SEO chrome extensions and tools like Semrush or Ahrefs (Understand the behavior of a specific page or conduct detailed keyword analysis)

Reverse-Engineer Your Competitor’s Strategy

It is a good practice to learn from the top-ranking competitors/pages. Learning from top-ranking competitors is key to growing your SEO. Carry out a detailed research and analyze the competitors’ content that can help you rank better. Here are a few things you can keep in mind:

• Check the content format if is it a listicle or a normal guide 
• Check the type of multi-media used in their content
• If there are CTAs what is the tone they have opted for

Optimize Your Content & Update the Existing One

Optimizing content is a way of providing your users with up-to-date information about their query. Not only the users, but even the search engines love fresh content. Updating the existing content helps to improve the crawl rate. The faster your content crawls, your page can get better visibility and ranking on search results.

Sometimes, it may even happen that old content might not seem to be relevant enough. So, updating the existing content is crucial. The content should match the user intent and perform well enough. Here are a few things to keep in mind while optimizing your page content: 

• Check if your content is meeting the user intent. If the keyword intent is informative, does your page provide the needed information?
• Add new keywords with a good number of clicks and impressions that you would like your page to rank.
• Update any broken links on your page or any older links.
• Check for the CTA placement within the page. If it is convincing enough for the user to make the purchase decisions, or does it look very forced?

Perform A/B Testing

Experimentation is the only way to know what works for your brand and what doesn’t.

Suppose you are thinking of performing A/B testing. In that case, you can understand your user better and align your efforts in that direction. For instance, for one page you place a call-to-action button in the first fold, and for the second page, you don’t. Here you noticed placing CTA in the first fold is giving you better conversions, so this way you can add strategies that uniquely work only for you.

You can invest your time in checking CTA, trying different content styles, placements, and more.  As a result, with more testing, you may create attractive landing pages and boost conversions.

Simplify Conversion Path

One of the best ways to leverage SEO includes simplifying the conversion process. As soon as the user arrives on your page, you can push them to the next stage of the sales process. You can either offer them a demo or a free trial to encourage them to move to the next stage. You can also consider these conversion rate optimization statistics to know the healthy range of conversion rates of your industry and optimize your website.

Identify Areas Where People Leave Your Website

It is mandatory to find out the areas where your users are leaving your page. The content provided might be relevant, but it may appear repetitive enough and not provide good value to the users. It may happen that SEO and CRO might not be moving toward a similar path and might have gotten the information from starting themselves.

The users may not find a reason to stay long enough and might think of leaving the page. Thus, if you can quickly determine the web pages where most visitors leave, you can try out better strategies and find out the areas for improvement. SEO helps find intent keywords that may keep users engaged, update the existing content and ensure visitors have the exact content they want.

Conclusion

It’s important to learn and know what is search intent to take the right action. Making appropriate use of search intent may help you create content that the users are exactly looking for. And as a result of that, you can see a boost in your conversions. I hope that this blog helped you to understand the user intent better.

If you have any questions regarding search intent. Let us know in the comment section, I will be happy to help you. Thanks for reading and good luck with your SEO journey.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are the 3 Cs of search intent?
Ans: The content type, content format, and content angle are the 3 Cs of search intent.

2. How does Google know search intent?
Ans: There are many factors Google takes into consideration while knowing the search intent. One of them is how the users are engaging with the search results, the feature snippets, and also People Also Ask section.

3. What are the 4 types of search intent?
Ans: The 4 types of search intent are Informational Intent, Navigational Intent, Transactional Intent, and Commercial Intent.