Online Marketing

Understanding User Intent: How to Turn This Concept into SEO Gold

As a business website, it can be easy to get caught up in your own goals to be ranked high on a search engine result. This, of course, will often end up with content that involves relevant keywords, multiple backlinks, and other tried-and-true SEO tactics. However, in all of this, you are actually leaving out something incredibly crucial: user intent.

See, there is a reason behind every term typed into a search engine. Everyone who does this is looking for something in particular. Now, to really win the SEO game, you need to make sure that you are providing your target audience with precisely what it is that they are searching for. Otherwise, they will simply exit your website shortly after they have clicked on your link.

To ensure that you are utilising all of the opportunities associated with user intent, it is always best to partner up with an SEO company like Shout Agency. These experts can gather more information related to this concept and thus provide your users with just the information that they need.

To learn more about user intent, however, keep reading…

The Types of User Intent

The first thing that you will need to understand is that there are three different types of user intent. So, you will need to identify just what stage your target audience is in and then offer tailored content to them. Let’s take a look at what these categories are:

The first step is all about collecting information. In short, the user is trying to educate him or herself about a particular topic. This stage is known as the information query phase and search engine results will mirror what the user is looking for.

Once the user has graduated from this stage, they will begin the navigational search. Here, the user is looking for content that is slightly narrower or more specific than his or her earlier searches. Therefore, the search engine results will mimic this by offering up pages that consist of guides or comparison posts.

Then, there is the transactional stage and this is when the user is ready to make a purchase. As such, all of the searches will be regarding e-commerce sites related to a specific item or product. So, which category do your business and website fall into? Once you have identified this, it is a matter of ensuring that the keywords, titles, and content follow the relevant structure.

Analyse Your Current Content

Now that you are aware of the types of user intent, you will need to determine if your existing content supports your preferred stage. To do this, you should do some research on your highest performing keywords. For instance, if your main keywords are transactional phrases but end up on informational pages, this is rather misleading for your visitors.

It is a good idea to go through your entire website, though, particularly with posts or pages that aren’t performing especially well. One of the reasons that this may be happening is because your keywords aren’t matching up to user intent. By making sure that there is compatibility here, you will be able to drive up the traffic. 

Create More Specific Future Content

Since you now have a better understanding of user intent, it is important to incorporate the necessary strategies into future content. To put it more concisely, specifically create answers for questions that you know your target audience is asking. This way, your content will automatically garner more attention from search engines as well as users.

To really give your content a bump, though, there are a few other tactics that you can use. To start with, make the posts as readable as possible. Incorporate bullet points and numbered lists as necessary but don’t be afraid to get in-depth about the subject matter.

You should also make it a point to back up any statements or details with the relevant statistics. Make sure that these are current and original. Finally, make sure that the post is of the highest quality possible and deserving of a high ranking.

As you can see knowing how to adapt to user intent can go a long way in improving your SEO ranking. So, this is certainly something that you should do for every page on your website.

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