Understanding the shift from traditional SEO to intent-based SEO and what that means for your marketing efforts.

Intro

Traditionally, SEO has been more about quantity over quality. Drive as many people as you can to your website and hope for the best in terms of business results.

The thinking is that if you capture as much traffic as you possibly can, there’s bound to be someone in that incremental traffic who’s looking for what your website offers and will convert.

But as the world becomes more digital, web users become more savvy and the fight for consumer conversions becomes more competitive, there has been a shift from traditional SEO to intent based SEO in order to deliver the best results possible for businesses.

What is intent-based SEO?

Intent-based SEO is ensuring you’re optimising your website’s content and user-journeys to match exactly what the user intends to do, based on the query they enter into search engines.

For example, if someone searches on Google for “US to EU shoe size conversion” their intent is much more likely to be finding a size guide conversion chart than it is to be presented with a category page of all the shoes on a website.

In a nutshell, this query has informational intent, rather than transactional intent.

This is the opposite of very broad and basic traditional SEO strategies that used to be employed, where the objective was to rank as highly as possible, for as many keywords as possible and watch the user count increase without necessarily focussing on metrics that matter.

How to identify user intent from keywords

Sometimes it’s simple, but sometimes it’s incredibly complex.

Consider the example above about “US to EU shoe size conversion”. Whilst this query in itself is informational, it’s highly probable that the broader intent is transactional. The searcher could have another tab open with a shoe product page and they’re simply trying to make sure they order the right size.

Another example of complexity is deriving intent from head terms. Keeping the same example going, the intent behind the keyword “shoes” is not particularly obvious without any qualifying keywords being searched with it (such as “buy shoes”, “shoe shop” or “comfiest shoe brands”).

So identifying intent is not easy, nor is it an exact science when analysing your keyword data.

There are varying ways to identify the intent behind the keywords. From using templated Excel formulas to automated Python scripts and deep learning, many ways require an element of technical nous, and whilst automation helps with scale and speed, there’s still definitely something to be said for a manual review. And particularly for small businesses where you may not be getting tens of thousands of users who are using tens of thousands of variants of keywords, a manual method is much more likely to be accurate, practical and feasible.

Regardless of your method, you first need a set of keywords to derive intent from.

Keyword Discovery

There are two places I would start when finding your keyword set:

1) Google Search Console – This can help you find the keywords that are already driving traffic to your website, helping you prioritise which keywords you need to identify intent for first. Below is an example of how this list of keywords looks for a website I have worked with previously, https://spanishclassessydney.com/

Top Tip: connect your Google Search Console account to Google Data Studio to work around the export limitations of exporting your data directly from GSC. Find out how to do that, in this Google Q&A.

2) Ahrefs or Semrush – These tools can help you find the keywords that you are visible for but need to improve their ranking performance in order to drive traffic.

Once you have your list of keywords that your website is getting traffic from and/or visible for, you need to prioritise these into which keyword(s) you want to work on first.

You will most likely do this by the keywords that are sending the most traffic. Unfortunately, Google no longer provides information on how keywords perform from a conversion/revenue perspective (unless you are running Google Ads through those keywords) so the next best proxy for performance is clicks and impressions, followed by ranking position.

You may also want overlay a metric such as monthly search volume onto these keywords. This can help identify which keywords you are optimising for, but aren’t getting a good share of traffic, and may help with your prioritisation. Both Ahrefs and Semrush provide a good tool to help with this task.

After you have your list of important keywords by priority of which ones to tackle first, it’s time to categorise.

Keyword Intent Categorisation

I like to keep keyword intent categorisation simple. It is generally accepted that there are 3 types of searches that users perform on search engines, and these fit quite nicely into intent categorisation:

• Transactional – when a user wants to buy something
• Informational – when a user wants to learn something
• Navigational – when a user has a web destination in mind

With an increase in location-based searches (such as including “near me”) there is a mixed fourth search type which could be included as a navigational search, but it is physically navigational rather than web navigational. Depending on the searchers intent, these types of searches could also be transactional or informational (for example “butchers near me” or “park near me” or “library near me”).

You could also categorise your keywords to align with your marketing funnel – usually Awareness, Consideration, Conversion and Retention. Whichever makes sense for your website and your business is the best way for you to do this.

If you have the time and the inclination, you can use one of the two methods linked-to above and categorise, otherwise just take a bunch of your top priority keywords and start to identify the intent behind them. Start with just the top 20 or 30 if this makes it more manageable.

Top Tip: as mentioned previously, sometimes intent is hard to uncover. An interesting way of identifying intent is to enter that keyword into Google and see what type of results are returned. Are they mostly transaction-based pages, or informational? Does Google Maps feature prominently? This will help you categorise those harder keywords – use Google’s categorisation!

The best thing you can do when categorising your keywords for intent is step out of your website/business owner shoes and think “what would I want if I searched for this”.

This way of thinking helps you get out of the mind-set of “I already meet all the intents for this keyword” to “what more can I provide to help a searcher get what they’re looking for”.

Optimising your website for intent

You’ve found your keywords, you’ve discovered the perceived intent for each one … so now what?

This is where the hard work comes in. But it’s also the most rewarding work you can do in terms of improving the performance for your website and, consequently, your business.

Again, the critical part here is putting yourself in the shoes of searchers who will turn into website visitors. This is the start of developing your own content strategy.

Think about the following two questions when assessing your content and how it aligns with intent.

What content are you providing?

An important first part of the process for optimising your content for intent-based SEO is to take stock of what you already have.

Mapping keywords to the pages you want them to rank for is the first step of understanding where your intent gaps are. Do you have a bunch of informational keywords, but only provide product or service pages on your website with little additional context or education for the user? Or do you sell yourself short and lack opportunities for your web visitors to convert once you’ve given them everything they need?

Once you have a list of your content gaps, you now have a goldmine of content you need to produce to help fulfil user intents when they’re searching for relevant queries.

But matching user intents isn’t just about churning out new content, it’s also about optimising what you currently have to make improvements.

What type of language are you using?

If you have a landing page that is targeting, ranking for, and receiving traffic for, informational-intent keywords, but your content is really heavy on marketing a sales language, how will your users interpret that?

It will likely turn them off and they will bounce off your website back to the search engine results page because they’re being pushed to convert rather than being educated on the topic they want to learn more about.

It may be the case where you have a product or service page ranking for these types of informational keywords, so you’ll ask “I don’t want to turn my conversion-focussed product page into an information page” and that’s completely understandable.

Here you can take two approaches: either create an information/education landing page, or co-optimise your product or service page to include deeper information and educational content.

What next steps do you give to visitors?

Whilst this can be considered more of a Conversion Rate Optimisation question and tactic, it’s still very necessary to think about when re-writing content or creating new pages for intent-based SEO purposes.

Sometimes people want to move very quickly through the marketing funnel, so providing them with a number of options to take different paths through their user journey is important to meeting intent – especially for keywords where intent is hard to define.

For example, if you have a blog post that is explaining a process that people can take away and use, without having to perform a transaction on your website, you can also include a contact, email submission, related products or quote CTA to give the option of users who may be interested in the content but also looking for the service you’re offering.

Top Tip: don’t get overwhelmed with what might seem like a massive workload creating bucket-loads of new content. Start by optimising your existing content and pages rather than creating new content. There are likely some quick-win opportunities where content, CTAs or language needs tweaking rather than completely overhauling.

Final Word

And there you have it, my overview of what it takes to get started with intent-based SEO and move away from traditional SEO.

It’s a transition that makes sense, because it helps futureproof your website for a multitude of varying intents and user journeys whilst improving your keyword rankings and opportunity for additional qualified traffic who you can provide a great user-experience for.

Intent-based SEO is the meeting of SEO and CRO, i.e. getting people to your website and giving them the best experience to complete their objectives easily.

Get your keywords, analyse your content and fill in the gaps where you aren’t yet meeting the intent of searchers. The results will be amazing!

Questions or thoughts? Leave them in the comments below!