Mastering User Search Intent: A Comprehensive Guide

Balancing both the methods-figuring of SEO keywords and user search intent is critical to attaining success in your SEO work. Many times, SEO experts fail to understand the in-depth meaning behind the user search intent. 

As an SEO expert, one must know that there are three big intent types, which include informational, navigational, and transformational. 

(Suggestion by Famous SEO Services Company) Most of the time SEO experts think about the search intent with the end goal in mind, i.e., generating conversions.

However, implicitly, they are also looking to bring down the underperforming traffic. 

Here is a list of some popular informational keywords that an SEO executive needs to be wary of: 

• I need to
• What are
• Best ways to
• Alternatives
• How
• What is
• Guide
• White paper 

The popular transactional keyword list includes:

• Buy
• Deal
• Coupon
• Review
• Order
• Discount
• Download
• Shipping
• Purchase
• Schedule
• Compare
• Top

Now, coming back to mastering the user search intent, find success in it by placing their ads or getting high page ranks for the commercial and transactional user investigation queries whereas most of the others fail to achieve the same.

Here is an example:

Upwork is a popular online platform for finding and hiring freelancers. Here’s how well they rank in Google for user intent keywords:

Hire freelancers  – 1

How to hire freelancers   – 3

Find freelancers  – 1

As you can see, Upwork has optimized well for its user intent keywords.

On the other hand, there are other websites (in the same niche) such as Fiverr and Freelancer, which rank well for some of their targeted keywords, however, when it comes to search intent, these sites are not nearly as well-optimized as Upwork.

This is how much Search Intent can affect your rankings and popularity in search engines like Google.

Here is a list of some key aspects that you must vary while you dig into your user intent plan to shift your content to make it more relevant and valuable for online readers, and boost your website rankings:

1. Set Priorities & Identify Focus Areas 

Well, as every other thing is imperfect in marketing, you can do much at a single time. However, while optimizing your website based on user search intent, this theory largely fails.

Why? This is because you cannot optimize every other part of your website for a new keyword phrase in a limited time, if you do so, you will waste a lot of time and end up hurting your good rankings. 

Better pick a section of your website, including selected products or services that you can work upon based on the searcher’s intent. 

2. User Intent: Existing vs. New Content Focus

To be very honest, focusing on existing pages and improving them based on searcher intent is more troublesome. 

Wondering how? 

This is because once you come across some new keyword scenarios based on the user search intent, that you know will surely boost your sales and increase traffic, you will often run into troubles (which can be overcome but requires time).

Improving existing pages for such keywords will consume a lot of time finding the answer to questions like how it will fit into existing text?

What needs to be changed? SEO page title? Images? The content header? etc. 

Well, in other words, introducing a new phrase or keyword by you requires the overall website content support to back it up. 

3. Keep a Firm Eye on the Search Volume 

Being SEO Experts, often we ignore keyword phrases with low volume, the ones hardly anyone uses. Isn’t it? But, that should not be the standard practice as an SEO starter.

Why?

The answer is simple. Suppose there is a low-volume keyword with only 20 estimated searches in a month.

But for that low-volume word, your website ranks fourth on SERP and the researcher who clicks your website using that low-volume keyword signs a B2B contract worth $300,000 for machinery parts with your business. It happens, now would you ignore it. 

On the other part, if we talk about high-volume keyword phrases, they are highly competitive for starters and could give you pause from ranking high in research results.

The high-volume keywords often have multiple purposes whereas your listed products or services on the website for the same are just a small part of it. 

4. Think Twice before going with the high volume, low competition advice

For years, experts in SEO have given advice to starters to look out for and pursue low-competition and high-volume keywords.

Sounds fantastic!! But, it is mostly thinking about the apple and oranges way. 

People in the SEO industry also suggest preferring Google Keyword Planner in an attempt to capture volume and determine competition through low, medium, and high rankings. 

Well, if that’s your preferred SEO technique, then here is the catch: the competition rating indicates advertising NOT organic searches.

This competition also references how many companies are bidding for the given keywords and doesn’t involve vital SEO aspects like page backlinks, page content headers, page titles, domain names, etc. 

5. Walk into the Shoes of Buyers and understand their Journey 

Well, the best advice that you must remember to create user intent catering content on your website is to walk in their shoes and understand their buying journey.

Ask questions like does it what I need to do? Is the content helpful and engaging? Does it help visitors find their answers? 

You must also understand the difference between the buying journey of B2B and B2C customers.

Your website also needs to be mostly structured around your prospect’s needs, if you want to grow your business through online sales. 

As a business, you must always check how does the navigation on your website affect direct potential customers?

For instance, do you have placed appropriate contact and chat features at relevant places on your website? 

6.  Embrace Paid Search

Yes, you heard it right. The global brands to understand the power of paid search. It can be smartly used by anyone to find data about the searcher’s intent for SEO work.

Google, being extremely absurd, does not reveal anything about keywords in analytics.

However, it is a bit more generous in the Google search console, as you can see several popular keyword phrases there. 

But, there is a problem!! 

The Ad Console has an enormous set of words. You can see the words that prompt Google to put your ads on top of the SERP and you might generate good leads.

But, here is the catch. Try putting those keywords into the website, and maybe you might rank the 60th.

Yes, it does happen. Just because it does well in paid search, it won’t mean you will nail it through SEO. But, again, PPC does have its own value.

Why? You must understand that if advertisers are buying some keyword phrases then they have high value and you can’t rule them out.

Conclusion

User Intent is and will continue to be an important aspect of ranking in popular search engines.

In the past year or so, Google has greatly shifted its search algorithms in the direction of making search results more friendly and relevant to the users, and user intent is going to be a major part of it.

It is high time that SEOs and marketers around the world start seeing the importance of optimizing their websites/content for the users, and not just for search engines. Use these tips to get better results out of your user intent marketing efforts.

Have a question or suggestion for us? Do write in the comment section and we will be more than happy to answer.