Amanda says: “In 2024, in SEO, we should be focusing on user intent – and building content, authority, and a website experience that matches that and helps people get towards their goals.”

How do we go about focusing on user intent?

“I think the first step in the user intent journey is to understand, firstly, what it is that our users are looking for and, secondly, how we actually answer the questions that they have.

Doing that initial keyword research and understanding who is in the market – that audience profiling, building those personas out, understanding what those touchpoints are, and then the type of information that they're looking for and how they want that presented to them.

Do they want it in an FAQ format? Do they want it in an image format? Do they want that answered quickly towards the top of the page? Do they want more additional information? Do they want external resources? Also, looking at how long it's going to take them to actually understand that information. Is it a very quick time to conversion? Is it a much longer time to conversion?

It's taking all this information into account, doing that initial keyword research, understanding who the audience is, and then how, as a result of that, we actually go about displaying that information on-site in a way that's going to give them the information that they need to answer their question. Then hopefully, from a business perspective, help them go on and purchase a product or engage with our service.”

In terms of understanding who the audience is, you started off with keyword research. You mentioned a few other ways that you can determine that, including surveys.

Is it always good to actually have a conversation with your audience, to have some kind of focus group, as well as relying on analytics from whatever digital analytics platform you're using?

“I think it's important to have a mixture of the two. Data is always key and, fundamentally, from a business perspective, if we're looking to attract users who are looking for a particular service or product, we first need to know what they're searching for. I think the keyword research does play a really important role in that – to understand what, from a data perspective, is actually going to bring people to our website and what kinds of questions they're asking.

But, I definitely think that focus groups play an important role. We work with a number of clients who conduct ongoing focus groups. The other thing that I would say is, in the past, we might have conducted a focus group and then we find ourselves using that focus group data 3 or 4 years later and assuming that that audience persona and those people that are coming to our website are still the same – but they're not. They've changed. They've got different consumption habits. They've got different interests. They're looking at different things. They want to talk about different things. They want to engage in a different way.

It’s not only about having the ability to access focus groups and actually talk to the audience but talking to them regularly – and not just talking to them in focus groups but asking for feedback. A lot of the time that can be running a test on the website where you get a little pop-up and you ask people to feedback on, ‘Have you found what you're looking for today?’, ‘Is there a problem?’, ‘What is that problem to conversion?’

Having that ongoing conversation with them really helps you to understand your audience, but it also puts you ahead of any potential changes in consumer behaviours that they might have.”

With regards to focus groups, and you mentioned pop-ups there as well, if you're going to have a conversation with a group of people, how do you determine who should be in that group? What kind of questions should you be asking?

“From a pop-up perspective, if you're doing it on the website, who will naturally fall into that group is the people that are on the website. It will be whoever's searched for your keywords in that particular respect. I don't think you have a lot of choice or control over who answers those specific questions.

If you're looking at the focus groups, particularly in terms of who we want to actually get in there, what I would do is start very broad initially. Sometimes, with data, we can be misled as to who our target audience is.

An example of this might be a watch client that we work with. When we look at the demographics for a lot of the pages that get visited, we find that the men's watch pages are very popular – I'd say maybe 70/30 over women's watches.

Off the back of that, you could naturally assume that our demographic is male because they're searching for men's watches. But, actually, when we go and do the audience research, we find that 75% of our demographic is female and they are looking for a watch to buy for someone – it might be for a partner, son, father, grandfather, etc.

When we're looking at the focus groups, one of the first things that we would do is look at the analytics behind that. That's not just looking at things like the pages that people are landing on or what content they're interacting with. That's important, of course, because it helps us to get an understanding of how users are going through the website. But, in terms of actually identifying that audience, there are a lot more touchpoints to that.

We have to bring together a lot of different data sources to ensure that we're not targeting the wrong people.”

That's great insight there. I suppose it also leads to identifying other keyword opportunities, such as gift-type keywords.

“Yeah, absolutely. That's broadening out as well and understanding what the intent of that audience is. So, not just who it is that's come into our website, but what they are actually looking for.

If I use that watch retailer example again, you're always going to have people who are looking for particular branded watches. You're always going to have people that are looking more generically for ‘men's’, for ‘women's’, for ‘kids’. But then there's the occasion shopper. So, in addition to your gifts keywords, there should be gifts for very specific occasions.

It could be for a specific wedding anniversary. It could be for Father's Day, Mother's Day, or Christmas. We even get people who are searching specifically for Black Friday because they know they're going to get a bargain on that day, so it's also events within the shopping calendar as well, where we can target that kind of audience as well.

In that instance, you can combine a specific event with your audience targeting to make a much more targeted strategy.”

Also, in terms of that research phase, there are different categories of intent that the user has. So how do you prefer to categorise user intent?

“In a standard way, we would look at the different aspects of the funnel – your top funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel – and understand how engaged they are in the purchase journey. There are a number of different ways that we can look at that.

The keywords give us a really good insight as to where they sit within that. If you have someone searching for a specific brand of watch, or more so a specific SKU number or a specific part or model number, they're probably bottom of the funnel. They're probably very, very close to converting. They may have done their research elsewhere. Maybe they've been into a shop, and they've seen something.

I was guilty of this actually. I went on holiday recently and I had a bit of time to kill in the airport because my flight was 5 hours late, unfortunately. I went into the sunglasses shop and I tried on a pair of sunglasses, and I really liked them. I felt so guilty afterwards because I took a picture of the model number, then I went online and I found them for a hundred pounds cheaper in a store, and I bought them.

But I was super engaged. I was right at the bottom of the funnel because I'd tried them on, I'd seen them and (rightly or wrongly) I'd taken a picture of the model number, and I'd searched for them. I think that's a big chunk of the market in terms of the bottom of the funnel.

Medium funnel might be people searching for a specific brand, but not knowing exactly which product they want or when they want it. It could be people who are more broadly searching.

The top of the funnel, from an audience perspective, is the research phase. It's people thinking, ‘Well, I might want to get my friend a watch for their birthday, but I don't know what kind of watch to get. I'm going to have a look around. I'm going to see what might suit them and see what the price points are.’

The importance of that for us, particularly from an SEO perspective, is to ensure that we're visible for the right long-tail keywords – so understanding what they are from an audience perspective. What are those points of conversion for the user? Is it price? Is it the colour of the watch? Is it the size of the watch? Is it the style of the watch? Then, making sure that we've got content and a strategy that targets all of that as well.”

I love your tip about optimising for your SKU number because, thinking about it, I've done that in the past. I've wanted a particular item, I've found the product ID or the SKU number and searched for that, and probably found the cheaper option by doing that.

Is that something that most SEOs are actively doing or is that a missed opportunity in many websites do you think?

“I think it's a big missed opportunity. I think SKU optimisation is often overlooked, but I also think one of the reasons why it's overlooked is because, when you start trying to optimise at the SKU level, it becomes quite a big project.

First, you’ve got to do your prioritisation of which SKUs you look at first, and then you've really got to optimise those product pages. A lot of the time you find that, for good reason, those product pages have quite generic copy – normally because there are about 10,000 of them and no one has enough time in their day to write anything unique for that. You'll often find a manufacturer description or that type of thing. When you start optimising at the SKU level, and you start generating that unique content, it can become quite a time-consuming task.

Also, those SKUs will traditionally have a lower search volume than something broader, like ‘Michael Kors watch’ or a ‘Sekonda watch’, or any kind of brand. They get overlooked because they're overlooked in favour of a higher search volume.

But, at the end of the day, if someone's searching for ‘Michael Kors watch’, they might have a 2% chance of converting. Whereas, if someone's searching for an SKU, they've probably got a 40% chance of converting because that's basically what they want.

The only thing I think is going to hold them back is either the price or reviews, if the website's got a bad review. If you're competitive on price and you've got good reviews, there's no reason why they wouldn't go on and purchase that. Even though the search volume is a lot lower for that, it's a much bigger area of opportunity because you've probably got lower competition because not as many people are doing it, but also the user is more likely to convert.”

So, it's easy to set a goal for bottom of funnel (obviously that's purchase when it comes to e-commerce), but what about earlier on, when they're just browsing your website? How do you set a goal for that and how do you encourage the user to come back when they're ready to buy?

“It's definitely a lot more difficult, especially when you're talking to stakeholders about it. Obviously, the purchase and the money are the ultimate goal, right?

For middle of the funnel, for us, we'll look at things like on-site engagement. That's how much time they spent looking at a particular product or at a particular category. We'll look at metrics like how many pages they viewed or how much time they spent actually going through the website.

If we're targeting more of the browsing traffic, like someone looking for a particular gift or a particular product, we'll measure that. We'll have a look at how engaged they are in that particular area of it. Then we'll take that information, and we'll build it into remarketing lists. We can do remarketing for things like basket abandoners. You tend to find that a lot of the middle funnel tend to be basket abandoners because they're not as engaged as the bottom of the funnel.

At the bottom of the funnel, they're super engaged. They know what they want. Chances are they've probably already decided they want to buy it, it's just a case of where. Whereas, middle of the funnel, they're not 100% sure what they want – and they're also maybe not 100% sure that they want to buy it or that they want to buy it at that point in time. We find them to have the highest level of basket abandoners.

Another way that we would approach remarketing, or getting them back to the website to answer that question, is building lists out of basket abandoners and retargeting them. That might be through a paid search channel or just adjusting our SEO strategy to pull them back into the funnel.

I think a lot of that is data collection and prioritisation. What are people searching for? What's trending? What's topical? Making sure that we're optimising pages that are likely to trend or likely to be popular, and then building a strategy around that.”

Yeah, brilliant. So, if an SEO was not working closely with a paid search team, they need to be working more closely doing things like remarketing like you mentioned there as well.

Is there anything that you do from an organic perspective, maybe from a brand perspective, to get that person to remember you – so hopefully you're the brand that they will come back to in the future?

“There are a number of things that we can do on-site, from an organic perspective. I often offer related products, so I encourage our clients to set up a ‘related products’ feature. What that means is, say someone comes onto the website and they are a browsing user – a top or middle of funnel user. They go onto a product, they haven't quite liked it, then they leave the website and go to another one.

Rather than getting them to leave the website, we'll always try and keep them on the website for as long as we can. That might be saying, ‘Actually, you know what? You weren't a big fan of this, but we know that you're a browser, so you weren't that high intent anyway. Here are some other options. Here's something similar, based on your preferences or what you've searched for.’

They might have searched for ‘watch with a rectangular face’. ‘Here are some other watches with a rectangular face.’ There are a number of programs out there that you can use on your website, that will understand the user intent that brought the user in the first place and dynamically show related searches or related products

From an SEO perspective, that plays an important role in tackling that top and middle of funnel, by saying to them, ‘Don't leave us. Spend a bit more time getting to know the brand. Spend a bit more time learning about us and the product range we have available. Here's another 6 rectangular watch faces that you might not have considered, but you might like.’”

Do you ever try to publish different web pages targeting the same keyword phrases to attract different user intent, or is that just diluting your potential success on the SERP?

“I wouldn't necessarily do that, from an SEO perspective. From a paid perspective, that's a different conversation, and I definitely think the A/B testing is there. But, if you have too many pages that are too closely linked, or too semantically linked, it can detract.

Google will look at those pages (and we're thinking about this from a purely SEO perspective now), and it probably won't understand which one to rank for a particular search term because it's probably not thinking too much about the user intent at that time. It's thinking about answering the question.

If both of those pages answer the question equally as well as each other, then it's not going to know which one to return, and it's going to hold us back in the search results. Despite the fact that it might match the user intent a little bit better, it's not going to be there to match it in the first place. So, it's not something that we would necessarily recommend.

Once we've got users on the website, we could then A/B test serving different dynamic content or dynamic products to see what matches the user intent, and we can adapt the website to that using various tools. At the initial acquisition stage, it would be a little bit risky, from an SEO perspective, to try that.”

Got you. So, you need to make sure that search engines just see one piece of content and you're maybe using JavaScript or some other technology to dynamically serve a different piece of content, just to make sure that you're optimising that visitor retention.

“Once they're on the website, yeah. Once they're on the website, we can nurture that path through the website a little bit better. But, at the initial point of contact, when we're answering that initial question, we want to have one really clear piece of content – one really clear page that answers that.

So that, if someone's looking for a particular type of watch, we know exactly where we're going to send them. Then, once they're on the website, if they have searched for a rectangular watch face, we can then say, ‘Hey, have you seen these other products?’ or, ‘Hey, maybe you would prefer this or maybe you would prefer that?’ – but we've got them at that point. Then we can push the user intent side.”

You've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2024. Now let's talk about what SEO shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What’s something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“To tie into this point around the importance of user intent, what I think people shouldn't be doing is looking at other SEO techniques that don't work together with user intent. One example of this would be link building.

Now, digital PR is something that we do; it's something that we champion. I think, when done correctly, it's an incredibly important part of an SEO campaign or an SEO strategy. But, at the minute, in some instances, people are very focused on building links for the sake of building links. ‘Links will bring me traffic, links will bring me performance, links will improve my keyword rankings.’

We're forgetting, fundamentally, what Google wants us to do – or what Google is there for. It's there to answer a question. If we're not answering that question, and if we're not providing content and a good user experience – an on-site experience that actually gets users to where they need to be and answers that question for them – then we could have all the links in the world, but we're still not going to have the relevancy to return for that search result.

From an SEO perspective, we need to be focusing on getting all of these things to work together rather than potentially over-prioritising an area without giving it the support it needs from another.”

Amanda Walls is Director at Cedarwood Digital. You can find her over at Cedarwood.digital.