Whether you’re running an organic search campaign or a PPC campaign, it all starts with a keyword search. Keyword search is usually the first step you need to take when planning to introduce customers to your website. The terms you’re looking for determine the type of content you’re going to create and how you’re going to optimize it.
However, every search hides behind an intention – a need or a desire – whether it’s a product, a service, a solution or just more information. Intention is one of the most important variables of marketing. All customer journeys, brand commitment and sales funnels begin with intent.
Brands that use the data to discover the context and motivation of each search leading users to their website will be able to provide an experience that will eventually result in revenue. How, then, can you capture the customer’s intent and influence the decisions he makes and the actions he takes?
Match keywords with intent
All marketers know the customer journey and the sales funnel. We know the different points of contact where customers interact with our brands and we spend hours planning how to interact with them at each of these points of contact.
However, we often overlook the baggage (context) that customers carry when they type these search queries. The three types of search queries – informational, navigational and transactional – only clarify the higher level intent.
Under each of these categories, you can find a variety of keyword subtypes that speak volumes about the researcher’s intent.
- Brand: Researchers indicate a preference for your brand.
- Unbranded: No brand preference at the moment.
- Product: Interested in a product or service you sell. These can then be divided into substitutes and incentives.
- Commercial value: based on the price of the product or service, such as ‘luxury watches’ or ‘cheap flights’.
- Competitor: terms related to the brand or product of your competitors.
- Demography: specify the nature of the consumer, for example “men’s watches” or “children’s music”..
- Opportunity: terms related to a specific event or purpose, such as “Halloween costumes” or “desolate flowers”.
Most companies will find that they want organic visibility for almost all of these research intentions. You can use a group of keywords from each of these categories as a starting list and develop them using your favorite keyword tool (because they haven’t yet started calling themselves “intention search tools”).
This will give you a better idea of the search volume, number of clicks, cost-per-click, difficulty, trends, SERP features and other variables, which you can use to estimate the number of interaction opportunities you have have with the customer. will cost you) as they go through their buying journey.
Determine how far your customers are from doing
In the image above, do you see a scenario in which a person looking for a “tomato plant” might eventually ask “why do my tomato plants turn yellow” in a few months? Research is a marketing channel that can reveal a person’s motivations and goals from the queries they type or talk to, as well as to help you discover their behavior from what they have finally done on your site.
A study by Northwestern University examined the “psychological distance” between the current state of consumers and their intention to take action using their search queries. The assumption was that the farther a person is from buying something, the more abstract his or her queries are and the more likely he is to use the “why” questions. As they get closer to their goal, they use more concrete contextual terms with verbs (action words) such as “boutique” or “buy.”
Data from nearly 25,000 queries revealed that researchers tend to click on the results with words that reflect the nature (abstract or concrete) of their research expression. Internet users searching with a browsing intention are 20 more likely to click on a result that insists on abstract words such as ‘best’, while those searching with an intention to purchase are 180 more likely to click on a result highlighting concrete words such as “shop.”
What do these results tell you? If you ask me, they emphasize the need to match the content to the customer at every step of the buyer’s journey. Aligning keywords with your customers’ mindset allows for more relevant messaging, targeted copying of ads or landing pages, and custom user experiences that generate more conversions.
Align your SEO with the customer’s intention
When people say that keywords are dead, it means that you don’t have to worry about “optimizing” your blog post or your landing page for a particular keyword or keyword set, because it doesn’t matter “intelligently” ” you insert keywords into your titles, subtitles, meta-descriptions or copy, Google laser search if its content matches the researcher’s intention.
They go from a search engine to a response engine. This is clear from how SERPs display a single answering machine (the clickless version of “I feel lucky”) as well as options such as “People ask too” and “Associated Research” to better gauge – and meet – the researcher. intention.
In short, Google is looking to
- Understand the researcher’s question.
- Analyze all available answers.
- Rank the answers in order of relevance.
This does not mean that all SEO is useless. Instead, you can use keyword search information to structure your content to appear based on evolving search features, such as instant responses. Then you need to make sure that you can actually provide the best answer. Ask yourself:
- Can you provide a specific answer that is consistent with the researcher’s intent?
- Is your answer structured in the right format?
- Does Google understand your content and think your website is credible enough?
Working towards the outcome of these questions can get you to the answer box for your search terms and targeted intentions, but if you want to stay there, you need to constantly improve on all of the above.
Analyzing Google’s SERPs for different sets of keywords can also help you make critical decisions about how to use SEO or CPP to target the right intent. For example, if a search term refers to a page containing blog posts, question-and-answer sites or forums, videos, etc., as opposed to the sales pages of a product or service, it probably means that there is no intent to purchase.
Separation thoughts
Achieving high rankings through keyword targeting is a long, complex, highly competitive process that is subject to errors of judgment. You’d better try to understand the researcher’s intent and context, and provide the best content, the content that concerns them at the moment.
The variables and factors that influence the matching of intentions differ from those you take into account when searching for keywords. A keyword does not need to have a high volume of research to have the intention to purchase and be profitable. Matching intentions makes it easier to target by keywords.
To really get better at search marketing, you need a lot more than technical referencing, high-quality content and links. You need to optimize your website to optimize the user experience at every stage of the customer journey and encourage it to take appropriate action that may lead to conversions.
Leave A Comment