Remember the importance of intent

Andrew says: “The number one thing for people to consider in 2023 is intent.”

What does intent mean to you?

“When I was thinking about what I should talk about, I chose intent, and I decided to deliberately leave it quite broad so that we can kick around ideas about all the different things that come up when we talk about intent.

Intent is really important in SEO, and it should play a key part in all the planning and processing you are doing. The most obvious question is: what is the intent when somebody is searching for something? When somebody Google’s a query, what is it they’re actually looking for and what is the answer that they want? The aim for us, as SEOs, is to try and match our content to that, and show that we know what the user is looking for and that we’ve got that answer.

It goes a lot broader than that, though, and there are many different types of intent. It comes in even before that point, when people are doing their keyword research and looking into the queries and things that they want to rank for. You need to consider, what is the business’s intent? That is something I bring up with clients. They want to produce more content, but why are they writing it? What is the intent for this piece of content? Often, the answer is very simple: it’s that they want to sell more stuff. However, you need to consider what that stuff is, who you are selling it to, and how often - all those kinds of things.

To bring it back and bang that ‘intent’ drum again: what do you intend to do? What do your customers intend when they’re searching for that thing that you’re trying to match this to? I am keeping the idea of intent deliberately broad, but it’s really important across all kinds of stages of SEO.”

When establishing intent, what comes first? Is it the customer, the business, the product, or something else?

“It has to be the customer. You might have the intent as a business owner to rank for ‘Facebook’. Great. Are you Facebook? No. Then you’re not going to rank for that, and you shouldn’t. Businesses generally already have answers to these kinds of tricky questions - about who their customers are and what they mean when they’re looking for these kinds of things. They often say that they don’t know, but they really do. They’ll have customer types, they’ll have user journeys, etc., and there are some great ways that you can show them how SEO feeds into these things.

Businesses have these lovely funnels that we’re aware of, like awareness, consideration, conversion, and then retention. However, as much as I love funnels, I also hate them because almost no customers do that. If you map a user journey, from when they first started thinking about something that you sell to when they buy it, they very rarely flow perfectly through the funnel in that way: where they’re unaware of your brand, then they’re aware, then they consider you, then they convert, and then they’re happily retained forever and ever and they pour all their money into your bank account. It never really works like that.

People mess your funnels up all the time. They’ll constantly zigzag around, they’ll jump up and down through your funnel, they’ll think about one thing, get halfway down, change their mind, come back and consider another product, then consider their budget, the colour, their availability, etc. It’s never a beautiful, linear journey.

You have to think about that from a customer point of view, and then show how that maps with SEO. Put the pieces of content that a website has onto this funnel. You might be able to show that you’ve got 50 pieces of content that are all top-of-funnel, you’ve got 10 pieces of content that are all bottom-of-funnel, and you’ve got nothing in the middle. That shows a really big gap.

All these people are looking for stuff in the middle to help push them to that last stage, and you haven’t got anything. You’ve got content for users that have never heard of you, explaining who you are and what you should be considered for, but there’s nothing then pushing them through those next stages of the funnel. Mapping that kind of thing - from the intent of customers to the content that they’ve got - to those funnels and user journeys that a lot of companies already have, can be really eye-opening.”

What are some questions that you tend to ask top players in a business when it comes to the intent behind the business or the product? How do you establish that for the first time?

“For a lot of companies, you will first ask, ‘Who’s your target audience?’ The stock response is, ‘Everyone. Everyone wants our stuff.’ If you pick into that a little bit more, they don’t. It will be a new modern piece of kit, like the latest flip phone, and they’ll say, ‘Everybody should have a flip phone, it’s amazing!’, but does my mum need one? She’s in her 70s and she struggles with her basic Nokia. She doesn’t need it and she doesn’t want it, so she’s not your target. You have to ask those kinds of questions - really picking into who their target audience is.

You also need to make them think about what kind of things they want, and what they need more of. That’s often a question I start with because clients will have all these really broad things that their business does. There are very few businesses that just sell one product. If it’s a service industry, they’ll have different scales of products that they’ll offer. If they sell cars, they might also do servicing, they might sell spare parts, they’ll have training courses, and other things as well.

It is often a case of getting them to focus on the right things. You’ll ask them, ‘If I could get you 100 more customers tomorrow, who do you want? Do you want more people buying your cars? Do you want more people booking your services?’ That will make them think. Buying the cars might be nice because that’s where they make the most money, but what actually sustains them through the long winters could be people getting their cars serviced. They might decide that what they really need for the business at the moment is 100 more of those because it’s retained business. People buy a car, and they never come back again for 10 years, whereas a person who has a really good service will come back once a year, every year.

I’m often asking those kinds of questions: about who their most profitable customers are and which customers they want more of. The standard response is always, ‘More of everything, please?’ but you need to be more focussed. Try to push clients to make that kind of decision. ‘If you had to choose one type of customer that you want more of, which would it be and why?’ That can be really interesting.”

How do you go about mapping intent to the different stages of the user journey, and targeting the right consumer at the right time?

“Most people will understand a lot of the types of intent that we talk about. They will either have done this themselves, or they’ll be marketers and they’ll have come across these terms before. There are informational queries when the user is in the early stages of exploring a topic - where they want to know who did something, they are looking for ideas about something, they want a definition for something, etc.

There are also navigational queries, where the user already knows what they want. They might want Majestic, so they Google ‘Majestic’, or they might even Google ‘majestic.com’. For those queries, they already know what they want or they’re looking for a particular place. Sometimes, they’ll want to go to the coffee shop they went to last week, and they’ll search for the name, for example.

Then, there are transactional and commercial queries - like consideration and purchase-oriented decision-making - and Google talks about those too. In Google’s documentation and their guidelines around these kinds of things, they use the terms: ‘do’, ‘go’, and ‘know’. A user wants to ‘do’ something, ‘go’ somewhere (like a particular website), or ‘know’ something. Analysing the intent of these queries matches up with what Google is saying. They’re trying to do this too, and they’re trying to steer people towards these ideas with their content as well.

You have to look at what the types of queries are. Looking at qualifying words is particularly helpful, like transactional terms. First, people will go through the stage of looking at all the options available, like ‘Mercedes’, ‘Porsche’, ‘Lexus’, or whatever products they’re considering. They will narrow it down to a shortlist and then, they might search for a voucher. If they’re searching for ‘your brand name + discount code’, then they’re telling you (and Google) that they already decided what they want to buy and who they want to buy it from, they are just looking for some money off.

Adding those qualifiers - like ‘voucher’, ‘coupon’, ‘buy’, ‘price’, ‘deal’, etc. – to keywords and queries shows you the intent behind that. If they’re asking ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ questions, then they’re probably slightly higher up the funnel. They’re in the informational area, kicking around ideas.

There is sometimes a conflict between what the business wants and their intent, and then what Google wants and Google’s intent. Google is always a key entity to consider in this. When you look at Google, and you look at their search results, they’ll often have indications of what people want. I was reading a piece by Tomasz Niezgoda from Surfer about this. When people search for hairstyle ideas, they don’t want 6,000 words - they want pictures. When people search for, ‘How do I fix my dishwasher?’ or ‘How do I fix this issue on my car?’, they want videos - they want somebody to talk them through it and explain.

Google will show that. Google will have video boxes, they’ll have image boxes, and they’ll start to bring in the most prominent bits of search. If it’s a quick answer, like ‘How old is Barack Obama’, it will just be right there on the search results. That can show you what Google thinks people are looking for.

You can try and hijack the search results and force what you think is the right answer in there, but sometimes it’s a longer process of persuading Google that it’s the better answer. You have to try and find the match between what the business wants, what customers are looking for, and what Google is showing people. That’s the sweet spot.”

How do you determine whether the content that you produce is most likely to be a close match to someone’s intent?

“An important way to think about this is to consider the intent of the page. What do you want them to do next, once you’ve got them on that page? If you know that they’re looking for information, or they’re looking for something transactional, are you helping them to reach that goal? Goal completion is something that Google has also talked about, although nobody’s quite clear on how they measure it. That goal completion could be finding an address or the phone number of the company, or it could be buying the socks that they wanted to buy. You need to think about whether your content matches up to the goal of the user.

Businesses are very good with this kind of commercial thing. They will say that they want their users to buy something, so they’re going to write some content saying it’s lovely and that they should buy it. It’s not often that easy. Sometimes, for informational queries and things that come higher up in the funnel, what you want them to do next is read another piece of content, sign up for your newsletter, or just go away and think warm, fuzzy things about your brand. That kind of purchase journey is a lot longer.

A lot of the companies I deal with are not B2C, with users directly and immediately buying a pair of socks. Nobody buys huge pieces of industrial medical equipment on a whim, for example. You don’t just drop 3 million pounds on a huge microscope that you’re going to put into your lab. That’s not an impulse buy like a pair of socks; it’s much more of a considered journey. There might be things that they need along the way, to help persuade their CEO or their financial director. It might be that what you actually want from this piece of content is for them to download the ‘Persuade Your CFO’ pack - that could be the conversion.

What do you think the customer wants? What do you think Google wants? What do you want them to do, and does your page help them with that goal completion?”

What shouldn’t SEOs be doing in 2023? What’s seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive?

“One issue I often see is what I call a ‘word soup’. There are some great tools out there that use things like the People Also Asked questions and ‘related searches’, and they’ll grab all these possible questions and combinations around the target query that you’re going for. The temptation can then be to write one absolutely biblical piece of content that covers every possible additional question, follow-up question, and question that questions those questions.

When you’re not quite sure where you’re going to aim a piece of content, it can be really tempting to just aim at everything, throw it at the wall, and hope that some of it sticks. There are times when that idea sort of works. AlsoAsked.com is a great tool for that kind of initial research around a question, particularly with financial stuff. With a query like, ‘What’s the best mortgage for a first-time buyer?’, there will be related questions like, ‘How do I get a mortgage?’, ‘Which is the best bank?’, or ‘How much deposit do I need?’, and those are all related things. That’s good - it makes sense, and you should put those in with your content too - but then you can find yourself going really deep down the rabbit hole.

What you end up with are these ‘word soup’ articles. People often point AI writing machines at these kinds of things. They pull out all the headings and the AI-generator goes wild. It’s really tempting, it can be fun - and it can occasionally be effective - but it can be dangerous too. It’s often much better to just think of Google as one of your customers, and bear your end customer in mind as well.

We’ve all arrived at an article that’s 6,000 words long and you just think, ‘I haven’t got time for this. I’ll go somewhere else.’ Think about your customers. Yes, it might be a good idea to get all those additional questions and related searches in, but that could be over two, three, or even ten articles. You don’t have to word-soup it into one ginormous piece of content.”

Andrew Cock-Starkey is the founder of Optimisey and you can find him over at optimisey.com.