Here’s Why Search Intent Is A Crucial Part Of Your Marketing Campaign

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5 billion searches take place on Google every single day and each of these queries is made with a goal – or intent – in mind. By paying attention to this intent, we can better understand just what our customers are looking for from our landing pages, websites and overall online presence and enhance our entire strategy to capture this.

In general, your customers will have one of four kinds of search intent – To buy something, to learn something, to not buy something and to go somewhere.

Before you can optimise your content to suit any particular kind of search intent, you need to work out what it is your customers are looking to achieve. Those looking for information will be turned away by heavy optimisation of buying keywords, while those looking to buy may click away if the purchase process isn’t clear.

Search intent is more important than ever and it’s time to start paying attention to exactly what your customers want when they search. Here, we’re exploring why.

Why It’s Time To Start Paying Attention

As anyone in the search industry will tell you, Google changes it’s algorithm constantly. While not every update causes a drastic fluctuation in the SERPs, they’ve released their fair share of broad core algorithm updates that have completely changed how marketers work. It might keep us on our toes, but they’re often needed changes that make the searching experience much smoother.

From the Hummingbird update in 2013 that saw Google’s SERPs take the first leap towards relevancy of results, to the RankBrain introduction in 2015 that introduced machine learning into the algorithm to improve Google’s assessment of search queries, the search engine has been putting users and their intent first. The algorithm update in March of this year has only made things even more challenging for marketers, with expertise, authority, trustworthiness and relevancy all playing a huge part in ranking – keywords optimisation isn’t enough anymore.

According to Ben Austin, CEO at Absolute Digital Media: “Content marketing has been changing and taking into account user intent has never been more important. The most successful content is written for the user rather than solely for Google’s algorithms and capturing search intent within this content is sure to bring search engine success.

Optimising For Different Types Of Intent

Once you’ve worked out which intent you need to focus on, optimising your webpages is the obvious next step – what isn’t as obvious is that optimisation differs completely for each intent group.

While navigational intent typically only needs your brand name clearly stated in your URL, or a recognisable web address otherwise, informational and transactional intent can actually work relatively well together. Those looking to make a purchase are still going to be in search of more information to secure their decision to buy. For this reason, a product page can still offer relevancy for informational intent users, who may be researching to find solutions to a problem.

Provided that your content is geared towards your main target, capturing more than one kind of intent is still possible. Make purchasing easy even through information-based pages without spamming the design and ensure there is enough information on a product page to appease those in the awareness stage of the sales funnel. Those looking for information have the potential to become leads in the future and so should be nurtured in the same way.

To find out more about search intent and how to optimise your website for each kind, you can read the full article, here.