Smash your keywords with search intent

Keywords have been getting heat from the generative AI crowd. You know the people I’m talking about: AEOs who insist we optimise for LLMs as a standalone practice. Optimising for information retrieval systems, AKA ‘old-fashioned’ search engines, is “not enough”. The same crowd tell us keywords no longer matter. In which case, search intent (customer/user intent) no longer matters. Search intent is arguably more important than it ever was, and keywords are how we understand it. So ignore the AEOs. They’re talking bollocks.

👉🏻 >>Keywords still matter to SEO (for now)<<

Here’s what we’re covering:

What is search intent?

There are four broad categories of search intent:

1. Navigational (looking for a specific website)
2. Informational (wanting to find out more/gain knowledge)
3. Transactional (wanting to perform a certain action)
4. Commercial (wanting to buy or hire)

Understanding search intent sounds difficult, sounds like you might need a degree in psychology. Thankfully, you don’t. Many keyword tools reveal search intent. However, if you’ve assigned keywords to your website without understanding the motivation behind them, there’s a simple way to check you’re targeting the correct keywords (more on that later).

The customer journey.

This particular customer journey isn’t the one happening after the user lands on a website. This customer journey happens before users come into contact with a business. Users like to browse. They like to weigh up their options. This is the AWARENESS stage. Users googling/ChatGPTing businesses that can provide the solution they seek.

When a potential customer familiarises themselves with the companies, they shortlist their favourites for the CONSIDERATION stage. Once users choose a few businesses, it’s time for ACTIVE EVALUATION. The customer pores over each website in detail to pick a winner. Finally, the PURCHASE DECISION is made, and they contact the business.

Keywords relate to the customer journey. All search terms have intent, but some keywords are more serious about taking action than others. Homepage keywords tend to be broad, industry terms. The reason is to attract as much traffic as possible. Users searching broad keywords aren’t always serious about taking action; they’re window shopping. So a broad keyword search can correlate to the AWARENESS and CONSIDERATION stages of the customer journey.

It’s during the ACTIVE EVALUATION and PURCHASE DECISION stages that users get serious. Broad keywords become long-tail keywords (LTKs). These are longer (no shit), specific keyword phrases about what the user really wants. The best example of this is online shopping. When we have an item in mind, and we want to buy it, we nail the details:

• ‘Brown leather drover hat’
• ‘Wide leg flannel trousers’
• ‘Giant orange PVC rabbit’

Details matter when we’ve decided to part with cash.

👉🏻 >>Find long-tail keywords and unlock your traffic potential<<

Finding the right search intent.

It’s preferable to understand search intent before you crack on with keyword research, but that doesn’t always happen. Businesses regularly pluck keywords from the ether and attach them to webpages, without knowing their value.

If you have a homepage keyword, type it into Google (if you’re not landing on page one, that’s another story, and not one we’re dealing with here). Let’s use my homepage keyword as an example:

The keyword ‘freelance SEO consultant’ reveals results from websites offering freelance SEO consultancy services. That keyword is loaded with commercial/transactional search intent. That means users googling that keyword are looking to hire an SEO consultant. Perfect for a website flogging SEO services (like mine).

Here’s where you might be going wrong with search intent. Let’s suppose you’re a copywriter and your homepage keyword is ‘copywriting for small businesses’:

The search intent for ‘copywriting for small businesses’ is predominantly informational. The results teach you how to write for small businesses. That keyword is searched by users wanting to learn. That means small businesses looking for copywriting services aren’t using that keyword.

A quick (not always accurate) rule of thumb: action words tend to have informational search intent (writing, editing, bricklaying, painting, etc.) and non-action words tend to have commercial/transactional search intent (writer, editor, bricklayer, painter, etc.) so if you’re struggling to attract web traffic, and convert that traffic, search intent might be to blame.

Article first published, 23rd May 2024.

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