Are your click-through rates (CTR) lower than usual? Understanding your CTR is key to attracting and maintaining high traffic.
In order to learn how you can boost your web marketing campaigns to improve your KPIs, CTRs, and the relevancy of your content; it’s important to know about one key aspect of search engine optimization…
This aspect is known as Search Intent.
What Is Search Intent?
Also known as user intent, search intent is the main goal of a user when typing in a query into a search engine.
Search Intent is the reason that inspires a user’s query. Utilizing search intent is the first step in trying to understand your target audience and why they are visiting your website.
Why Does It Matter?
Satisfying user intent is Google’s ultimate goal. Therefore, the success of SEO and content marketing revolves around demystifying your user and their search intent.
Understanding user intent enables you to create and add context to your content. This allows you to put the right content in front of your target audience at the right time, which in turn increases your click-through rate. Additionally, properly matching search intent helps you position your business as an authority in your field. Being able to provide relevant content that matches a user’s query nurtures trust; it lets them know that they can rely on your company to provide the right solutions to their dilemmas.
4 Types of Search Intent
Now that you understand why understanding user intent is important for SEO and how it can boost your CTR, it is time to utilize search intent.
The first step is to know and understand the different types and how to use them to improve your relevancy and to increase your CTR.
Here are the different types of search intent:
1. Informational Intent
Informational intent is based on a user’s quest for information. Typically, the user is seeking to learn about a certain topic or product. These are the most common types of searches conducted by users.
When people have questions, they seek content-rich pages that will provide them with this information.
If your website is informational, concentrate on tapping into this user intent. Keep your content simple and easy to skim through so that users can get important information fast. Use small paragraphs that are packed with valuable information so that you can potentially get a Featured Snippet in Google’s results.
Featured snippets can dramatically change your CTR and even steal tons of traffic away from the first organically ranked result. You can optimize your content for Featured Snippets by making sure you are answering a highly sought-after question with a unique and valuable solution that is unlike your competition.
2. Navigational Intent
Users input navigational queries when looking for a certain page or website. These users already know the company or brand they are looking for but need assistance getting to a certain web page or product.
Users typically include the brand name in their query, alongside whatever it is they are looking for.
To maximize navigational intent, optimize the metadata of your home pages and product page so that it is easy to see what your pages are and how they can navigate them. The meta-titles and meta-descriptions of your pages should contain target keywords to match the search intent of your target audience.
Information architecture can also help further increase the navigational intent of your website by creating a solid site structure that is easy to use and browse through.
Make sure that each page is properly interlinking between the rest of your pages. A comprehensive internal linking strategy not only improves user experience, it also aids SEO by helping Google better understand what your website and webpages are about. This will allow site crawlers to get around your site easier, and index it better.
Anytime a user conducts a navigational search specific to your brand or product, your website will appear on the top of the SERP.
3. Commercial Intent
A commercial investigation is an intent that is focused on getting more information on a product or service that a user already intends to purchase. The user wants to make a purchase but is seeking more information to guide them to pick the right product or service.
Long-form reviews and informational content is a great way to draw users in and potentially drive them to your product pages for conversion. You can create content such as infographics, reviews, case studies, to demonstrate your product’s uses and benefits to the user.
Highlighting benefits is key for selling products and services. Users want to know how they can benefit from your products or services. Features are nice, but how can these features be used in their daily lives? How can your product or services make their life easier or more enjoyable?
These are the questions your site should be addressing to help raise your click-through rates and conversions.
4. Transactional Intent
Users conduct these searches when they are ready to make a purchase. People look for products online by attaching keywords such as ‘sale’ and ‘price’ to their queries in order to find the ones that best fit their specifications.
To tap into this user intent, make sure all of your product pages and their corresponding metadata are properly optimized.You can also boost your search ranking with content marketing.Reinforce your on-page SEO efforts by creating valuable content to help raise your products through the depths of Google’s search results.
Simply creating meta titles and descriptions and adding a few bits of information may not be enough to get your products to the top of SERPs. A few ways to help better your chances of getting ranked include:
- Creating long-form content that provides actionable tips and insights that help your target audience make informed buying decisions.
- Reviews on the page can be aggregated using structured data to show your reviews directly in SERP
- For some products or services, case studies can be extremely useful and show how the product or service can be used by the customer with an in-depth example.
Transactional intent is arguably the most important form of search intent. Users are typically ready to buy this product or service and are done researching the best option for their transaction.
Create Content Accordingly
To stay relevant and to boost your CTR, provide content that addresses the common concerns your target audience face at every step of their customer journey and optimize for search intent. Taking a deep dive into the user intent of the queries of your target audience is the key to providing users with the right content at the right time.
Evaluate Existing Content
It is important for your existing content to match user search intent as well. Take the time to analyze your content for relevance in the current market. You can perform a content audit to assess whether you have content to cater for every user intent, or how well your existing content matches user intent.
Perform keyword research to see how your content measures up. You can extract the keywords with the help of tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Check out what ranks for those keywords and how well your web pages compete for the top ranking spot, and optimize accordingly.
Conclusion
Satisfying search intent should be the ultimate goal of your SEO strategy. Every other strategy you apply would be null if it cannot attract clicks to your website.
The only sure way to get the clicks is to appeal to user search intent. Before you hurry to utilize this SEO technique, understand the different types of search intent. This will help you know how to optimize your web pages. Keeping all your content relevant and original will boost your CTR exponentially.
