Search intent is what a user is aiming to find when they search the internet.
Search engines take this idea seriously when they put results in front of people. If they did not, the results would not be any good and nobody would use the internet to search. So how much do we take that intent into account when we plan our SEO strategy?
Audiences are getting more demanding, and meeting their needs is getting harder for search engines, for the companies publishing content and for the writers producing it.
Search engines like Google keep search intent in mind at all times, and they are raising their game and getting more demanding about the content they show people who run a query. Do not worry, because in this article we will hand you the keys you need to get started on this and to build useful articles that rank well.
Before we start any web design work, on every new job we ask who the company’s target audience is and what that audience wants. Then we build toward the most accurate and most successful site.
Reading User Intent Out of Keyword Searches
At this point you may be wondering: were keywords not the most important element when you write an article or build a web page? Keywords still matter, and to see why they are no longer the only focus we have to go back to the beginning.
In its early days Google used a mathematical algorithm to display search results. Powerful and inventive as it was, that algorithm was relatively simple and took three things into account:
- Anchor text: the visible text you can click to visit another website.
- Keywords used on the site: the keywords that should appear in the article’s title, its subheadings and its body.
- Backlinks: the number and the quality of links coming to the page from other sites.
Ranking sites on those three elements is what made Google better than its main rivals AltaVista and Yahoo at the time, because it could give people better and more relevant results.
So back then a good keyword analysis, using the keywords in the text and picking up backlinks was enough. Which led to fake websites trying to fool Google by overusing those keywords or acquiring too many artificial links. Google addressed the problems with a series of updates, and it was never quite enough. Bringing search intent into the equation is where the real change began.
At Türk SEM we think Google worked this out from Google Chrome and Analytics data. It is reasonable to conclude that it generalized from what it collected there.
Google realized that its mathematical algorithm had to change and get more complex so it could understand what users were doing. It needed an algorithm that would work in a more human way, raise the quality of the results, and be harder to trick or get around. That was the moment search intent started to count, and it happened because two new elements entered the equation:
- User behavior, understanding how users move through pages and working out whether the content answered what they were looking for.
- Semantic understanding of a page’s content and context. (NLP, which I am planning to explain properly further down the line, do not worry.)
These two new elements do not replace the earlier ones, they complete them. Keywords and links have not disappeared and have not lost their validity, they still matter. They are just not alone any more. Now the more human factors count too, the ones about text quality and information value. Which is what users actually care about.
Putting these in order of importance is genuinely hard. I would say all 5 of these basic criteria matter. Though from period to period some of them become more important than the others. Who knows, a 6th item may get added later on. Given that we are writing this in 2024, some of the stones could shift in 3 to 5 years.
Back to the subject: what did all this lead to? For one thing, searches aimed at the same intent, such as “exercise at home” or “how to lose weight at home”, no longer need two separate articles, because they cover the same subject. That was not the case before, and having two separate articles would have helped your rankings. Do it today and you can damage your own content, which leads to what is called content cannibalization and weakens the SEO of both articles.
Types of Search Intent
Now that you know what search intent is and why it matters when you write your articles and design your page, let us dig into the fact that this intent is not always the same. People go online for all sorts of reasons. Going through those reasons together may give you a few ideas. Understanding the kind of content people are after will help you understand online behavior better, choose keywords more effectively and prepare better content.
Informational
When a person has informational search intent, they are looking for information to understand a subject better. The intent can be simple here, where the user wants a short, plain answer that needs no lengthy explanation. Google is aware of this, and for cases like that it built the featured snippet, which gives direct answers without anybody having to click an article.
You can also run into a more complex informational intent, where the user is after answers that are not that simple. In most of those cases Google prefers to display a snippet.
In those cases, if you want Google to pick your page as the answer to this kind of intent, our advice is this: make sure the information you provide is accurate, well researched and properly written.
Navigational
Navigational search intent shows up when a user is trying to find a specific website or company. That is what happens when somebody types “YouTube” or the name of a particular brand. In cases like these Google displays the official website to help users get there quickly.
You can also call it navigational search intent when the user wants to know the physical location of a company, a store or a place.
Fundamentally, with this kind of intent the user already knows the company and what it does and all they want is to interact with that business, to buy its products or use its services.
We opened our YouTube channel not long ago. We share important, critical information about digital marketing there, and you may want to subscribe.
Transactional
These are broadly searches made with the intent to buy. The best way to serve this intent is product pages or paid ads. Searches of this kind usually carry keywords such as “price”, “buy” or “deal”, among others.
How to Use Search Intent in Your SEO Strategy
Now it is time to work what we have shared into your SEO strategy. How is it done? Here are the steps:
Traditional Keyword Analysis
As we said before, search intent matters but it does not replace keywords, it only completes them. So the keyword analysis you do will not change. To find the most relevant keywords with the least competition we recommend SEO tools such as SEMrush, our own Keyword Research Tool or Ahrefs.
Check the Search Intent on Google
Knowing and analyzing the content of the sites in the top 10 Google results for your chosen keyword will help you understand which sources people find most interesting, and therefore help you rank higher. What kind of content do they have? What are they offering people? Take inspiration from those angles to build your own content and improve your odds.
Adding Value
The previous step is a good starting point, but keep in mind that Google already rewards websites with a unique value proposition. If you copy their content or their general structure and write something very close to the well positioned sites already there, ranking ahead of them will not be possible (and your content could even be treated as plagiarism). So go one step further: take them as a guide for inspiration, then add a unique touch through extra information, visuals or interesting additions. And avoid following the crowd. Revise your content for the year you are in. Your competitors may have written theirs 5 years ago, and a lot can change in 5 years.
Analyze the Content Type
SEO tools can also help you identify the most popular content format for a keyword. That way you can decide whether an article or an ebook suits a particular keyword better.
A Closing Note
An interesting story: the largest “holiday news” portal of its day in Turkey operated inside our company. At exactly that time Google switched on its content understanding strategy and added user behavior to its algorithms as a decisive factor. With that change, in the winter months our site suddenly slipped in search, and it slipped on its own name, “holiday news”.
It took us a year to work out why. The core reason was that in winter students were searching for “snow day news”. As a matter of site policy we did not publish snow day news. So because we were not serving what students were searching for, we slid a long way down the results.
Take it from me: never forget that a search phrase can shift even within a single year.
If you enjoyed this, have a look at How to Write SEO Friendly Content as well.
