What Is Search Intent?
Search Intent (aka “User Intent”) is what the user wants to achieve when searching through a search engine. Typically, the user might be looking for answers to questions (informational), a specific website (navigational), or products and services to buy (commercial or transactional).
For example, a user searching for “best dry cat food” on Google has a commercial or transactional intent. The user is looking for options for dry cat food and may proceed with a purchase if it finds suitable products.
Google knows what the user wants (using data from past user interactions for the particular query) and adjusts the search results accordingly.
As you can see in the above screenshot, it shows articles that include lists of the best products and filters to find individual products.
Why Is Search Intent Important?
Google’s main goal is to present the most relevant information to users in the fastest way so they can return for more searchers. If your content is not relevant to what users want, it won’t rank in Google, no matter what SEO tactics you use.
In other words, if you want to rank in the top positions of Google, you must understand how to create content to match the user’s search intent. Other benefits, besides rankings, include the following:
- Keep your users happy: Like Google, your website’s long-term success depends on your ability to provide content that precisely answers the questions and solves your audience’s problems.
- More conversions: Optimized content for search intent will more likely convert visitors into customers, fulfilling your business goals.
Types of Search Intent
When it comes to SEO, search intent can be categorized into four types: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. Knowing the different types of intent can help you work with tools (they use the same terminology) and optimize your content for each type.
Informational
Informational search intent (referred to by Google as a “Know Query“) is when the user is looking to find information, learn something, or explore a topic. The query may be posed as a question (for example, how to fix a zipper) or a phrase (for example, calories in banana).
In most cases, Google will attempt to provide a direct answer to the user:
Or part of an answer through a featured snippet, with links to get more information:
Information queries make up the majority of Google searches and can significantly boost your website’s visibility in the SERPS. It’s also a great way to gain Google’s trust and build authority.
Even if your goal is to go after the money-making queries (commercial and transactional), you should still target informational keywords by providing helpful content to answer user’s questions and solve their problems.
Navigational
Navigational search intent (referred to by Google as a “Website Query“) is when users use Google to search for a specific website or webpage.
For example, people typing these queries on Google (YouTube, Reliablesoft, Wikipedia) want to get the link to visit a particular website.
Perform a search on Google and ensure your website shows up in the first position for your brand keywords. If not, optimize your homepage to include your brand name in the page title.
You can also consider running Google Ads targeting your brand name and related searches to avoid losing traffic to competitors.
Commercial
Commercial search intent (referred to by Google as a “Do Query“) is when users are looking for specific information about a brand, product, or service. Their intent can be both informational and transactional. They may look for information (compare products, read reviews, or get a list of products to meet their needs) or proceed to a purchase.
Examples of commercial search intent include “best laptops for students,” “Semrush review,” and “BMW X3 Vs. Mercedes GLA”.
Transactional
Transactional search intent is very specific. The user is ready to complete an action, whether purchasing, signing up for a service, or booking a table at a restaurant. Transactional queries are the most important for achieving your business goals.
Here are a few examples of transactional queries:
- buy disneyland tickets paris
- Netflix pricing
- best deals on iphone
Here is a summary of the different types of search intent.
How To Determine And Optimize For Search Intent
Finding the search intent is important for your content marketing strategy because it tells you the stage users are in a digital marketing funnel. A simplified version of a sales funnel has three steps:
- Awareness: At this stage, users search for information or solutions to their problems. They use different kinds of informational keywords like “how to check Google Rankings”.
- Consideration: Users are investigating ways to solve their problems. They use commercial keywords like “best rank tracker tools”.
- Conversion: Users are at the bottom of the funnel and ready to convert. They mainly use transactional or commercial keywords.
Of course, not all users follow the same path, but categorizing users based on their intent can help you figure out what kind of content to provide to push them down to your sales channel.
Let’s see what is the best way to do this.
Step 1: Analyze Your Target Keywords
Start by examining the keywords you wish to target. Look for clues in the words that make up a search term like “buy,” “how to,” and “what is,” which can indicate the type of search intent.
Use a keyword research tool to find the intent of a keyword. These tools use different techniques to categorize keywords, and although it is not always helpful, it is still good to know.
However, just identifying if a keyword is informational, commercial, or transactional does not tell you much. You can get a rough idea, but to understand how to create the right content for each keyword, you must go through the rest of the steps.
Step 2: Review the SERPS
This is a crucial step of the process. You need to review the SERPS carefully and look for the following:
Content Type – Notice whether the top results are blog posts, product pages, forums, videos, or optimized landing pages. This can tell you much about what Google thinks is the best way to satisfy the searcher’s intent.
Content Format: Look at how the information is presented. Is it in the form of lists, how-to guides, step-by-step, or normal blog posts? This gives you an idea of how users prefer to consume information for these queries.
Content Angle: Identify the unique selling proposition or the angle top-ranking content takes. Are they focusing on beginners, offering expert advice, or comparing options?
Content Depth: Evaluate how in-depth the content goes into the subject. Is the top-ranking content short or long-form? Is there a pattern in the content length for the top 5 pages?
SERP Features: Does Google show a local pack, featured snippets, or rich snippets above the organic results?
Let’s see an example to understand this step better. When you search Google for “SEO Tools”, you get the following:
At the top of the page, Google lists SEO tools from sources across the web. These are the most popular tools for Google because they’ve been referenced many times in other posts.
The organic listings are blog posts with lists of free tools. Notice that Google does not rank pages with paid posts because they know that users prefer free options when searching for “SEO Tools”, although they don’t use the word free in their search.
Also, notice that most top-ranking posts include the year in their titles to show that the list is updated.
What does this mean to you?
If you want to rank for this keyword, you need to:
Create a listicle that will contain a list of free tools.
In your content, you should include most of the tools that Google shows in the top part of the results. There might be hundreds of other tools, but the ones listed are the most popular for Google. So, to make your content relevant, you must include those as well.
In your title, you need to use the words “best, free,” and optionally, “year.”
Step 3: Identify Topics To Cover In Your Content
This is by far the most important part of the whole process. Besides looking for patterns when analyzing the SERPs, you should also look at the actual content of each page and find similarities.
Here is a step-by-step example. Let’s say you want to rank for an informational query, “SEO Results”. To figure out how to write content to satisfy the search intent, you need to follow this process:
Search for “SEO Results” on Google and visit the top-ranking pages.
Open a Google Sheet and write down the title of each page and a list of all the topics they cover in the content. You can easily extract this from the article headings.
Compare them side-by-side to find their similarities and differences.
This is how it looks for the first two articles.
Notice the following:
- Both pages include the words “SEO Results” and “Measure” in the title.
- Both pages cover similar topics (shown in Green in the screenshot above).
- Both pages use similar headings.
- The article structures are similar.
What is different in the above pages is the actual content for each heading and sub-heading.
You’ll notice a similar pattern if you analyze the pages ranking in positions 3 to 5.
Step 4: Optimize Your Content
The last step is optimizing your content with the information gathered in Steps 1 to 3 and finding ways to improve it.
If you “copy” what the other articles are doing, you give no incentive to Google to rank your post higher.
You should find other topics that might interest users and incorporate those into your content. Go to the SERPS and look for the “People Also Ask” section and “Related Searches”.
Try to find topics in these sections not covered in the top-ranking posts.
For example, “How to Use Google Analytics to Measure SEO” is a related topic that is not covered adequately in the content of these posts. This can be the differentiating part of your post.
To summarize:
Your article title should contain the words “SEO Results” and “Measure” or closely related. Check and ensure that it is not exactly the same as other titles shown on the first page of Google.
Your content should cover all the topics (highlighted in Green). You can differentiate your headings and ensure that the content of each heading is unique and not the same as the existing articles.
Include additional topics like “Google Analytics” to differentiate your content further.
If you follow the above process and your content is high-quality, unique, and useful, it has more chances of ranking in Google. You minimize your chances if you take a completely different approach and content angle.
Don’t forget that Google does not guess what users like. They have enormous amounts of user behavior data about every possible keyword and know from past user interactions what type of content is suitable for a search query.
