Today’s marketers face a deluge of information in the face of shifting Google ranking algorithms. With the pressure to keep all clients’ 1st-page ranking intact, they are often needed to work out strategies to improve search engine rankings, with intention, extension, and authority. When we optimise for intent, we influence SERP results in our favour and improve metrics like CTR for our campaigns.
Here are 5 key strategies worth noting:
1 – Focus on keyword research
When users add in queries, they are looking for one of the following types of information
- Informational – It answers questions like what, how, and why.
- Commercial – It explains specific queries about a portal like directions or ratings, reviews.
- Transactional – For carrying out transactions online
- Navigational – The redirect happens to brand URL
Sites like SEMRush and AskThePublic work well for information keywords while Google AdWords work best for transaction queries. Then a self-analysis and competitor analysis will direct with the right keywords to be used.
2 – Optimise existing content
This also helps boost the alignment of your site content with user intent. You can find out if the efficacy of your meta description, URL, and title tag are aligning with the user intent for a particular search term. This can be seen by filtering Google Search Console to assess the CTR of the top ranking URLs. You can also go one step ahead and analyse session times, bounce rates along with the tracking code to execute conversion optimisation strategies that align with the intent and generate dollars for the company.
3 – Let Google search provide contextual answers
Remember the autocomplete feature when you type a query? This can be helpful in augmenting your intent determination exercise. Make sure to run the keywords in incognito approach so that the results remain impartial. The suggestions will show what words are deemed more important by the search engines like Google and Bing.
4 – Factor in natural language
Leading indicators like voice search terms or posts from the target audience’s social media profiles give vital clues on what words users would use for typing their search queries. By engaging with target market via surveys or social media questions, marketers can get a fair idea about the intent behind the terms and jargons they utilise.
5 – Paid marketing analysis for competition
It is important to factor in PPCs in addition to SEO. Tools like SpyFu and SEMRush can be vital in assessing the competition on the paid marketing side of things. You can concentrate on landing pages to examine how the competition is using meta description, URL, and title tag to rank better on paid searches. This helps you extract maximum value from the dollar spend on your paid marketing campaign.
With these tips, you can give direction to your SEO strategy by emphasising on user query intent. Do let us know how was your experiment with user intent and if you need any help with it.
