Why Is Search Intent Essential for SEO: The Best Ways to Optimize For It

Search intent is the term a searcher types in a search engine box while performing a search query.

Web pages appear in search results only when a searcher performs a search query. 

Hence, as a website owner, you must be aware of the latest and popular keyword intents to enhance your website’s SEO in line with them.

Types of Search Intents

There are following four types of searches performed by a searcher,

Informational: When searchers perform a search query to gather information or educate themselves on specific things.

Navigational: When searchers look for a specific web page or a website, they perform a navigational search.

Commercial: A commercial search is performed when searchers try to find a product or service before making a buying decision.

Transactional: When searchers are ready to buy a product or service, they perform a transactional search.

How to Identify Search Intents?

Following are the ways to identify various types of search intents,

Informational

The most common type of search intent is informational, as predominantly Google is an informational engine first.

You can identify them by some specific words or phrases generally used to perform informational searches, like:

1. How
2. Where do I
3. Why
4. Best way to
5. What is

Navigational

Navigational searches are specific. The searchers know which exact web page or site they are looking for.

It is essential to check whether your website appears in search results for a navigational search on your brand.

Commercial

When searchers look for a product or service before finalizing the purchase, they perform a commercial search to check all the available options.

 

You can quickly identify a commercial search by the usage of a product, brand, or service name within the search query.

Transactional

When searchers are ready to buy a product or service, they perform transactional searches to check the best offer available.

Transactional searches can be identified by the usage of specific products or services in the search queries.

Why Is Search Intent Important in SEO?

The bird’s eye for any website is to appear on the first page, if not the first position, of search results. 

A website optimizes its SEO to achieve that.

But what are these search results basically?

They are the results generated by the search queries the searchers perform with specific search intents.

Unless your content is optimized for user intent, obviously, you cannot appear in search results.

In addition,

1. Being a search engine, satisfying user search intent is Google’s first and foremost goal. So, you need to enhance your user intent SEO to rank in Google search results pages.
2. In their latest search quality evaluator guidelines, Google gave utmost importance to search queries. In fact, the entire Part-2 is about understanding search user needs. 

   

3. According to a blog published by Google, search intent is the new formula for growth in marketing.

How To Optimize Content For Search Intent?

Now, that you know the importance of search intent SEO, the next step is optimizing your content for user intent.

Following are the key steps you need to take,

Perform a Keyword Research

Whenever you cover a topic, you need to develop your content keeping the user intent in mind.

You must think, from a user’s point of view, what search query and keyword intent will be satisfied by your content.

You must know the exact keywords users can use while searching.

The only possible way to know that is to perform in-depth keyword research.

And nothing can help you more than the keyword research feature of the RankWatch tool for this purpose.

Just follow the below steps for your keyword research,

1. Log in to your RankWatch account and go to the dashboard.
2. Go to keyword research and enter the primary keyword.
3. Select the location and hit the ‘Search’ Button.
4. The tool will provide you with an entire list of keyword suggestions along with their search volume, competition, and CPC. 

   

5. The tool also suggests keyword-based questions mostly used by the searchers in their queries. Using those suggestions can effectively increase your SERP rankings. 

Further, you can utilize Google’s search console to improve your underperforming keywords’ performance. 

However, as GSC comes with data limitations, you must overcome that hurdle first.

So, how to overcome this limitation?

Here comes the RankWatch console, the most sophisticated tool that can let you utilize GSC to its full potential by overcoming all boundaries.

Follow the simple steps below to add your Google search account with the RankWatch console and extract the full potential of your GSC,

1. Log in to your RankWatch account and go to the dashboard.
2. Click on the ‘Console’ tab.
3. Select your Google search console account and profile.
4. Add your GSC account to the RankWatch console.

Design Your Content in Line With The Search Intent

Google prioritizes the most relevant content satisfying users’ keyword intent in its search results.

Hence, if you want your content to rank higher in search results, put your feet in users’ shoes.

Design your content in line with user search intent.

However, that does not mean stuffing your content with targeted keywords. That may look spammy to Google and can do more harm than good.

You must design your content hovering around the search intent and place keywords naturally to achieve search intent SEO.

Writing top-notch content is essential, but enhancing it further for search intent SEO demands using the right tool.

Here comes the SEO IQ feature of RankWatch to provide you with those search intent SEO enhancement tips.

The feature offers improvement ideas for your content in detail.

You can get suggestions on keyword usage by clicking the content recommendations tab. That also measures the relevancy of the keywords to the context of your content.

You can find the optimization status of your landing page content by clicking on the ‘Content Editor’ tab. The tool also provides you with keywords for better user intent optimization.

Clicking on the ‘Questions’ tab of the content editor will provide you with the most popular search queries often used by searchers. Using them as FAQs or headings in your content will definitely enhance your user intent SEO.

Choose Subtopics to Satisfy Passive Intents

The title and the main content should satisfy the primary search intent. 

Moreover, you need to design your subheadings to cover relevant subtopics within the main content to satisfy passive user intents.

You should break your content using H2, H3, and H4 tags.

Inserting secondary keywords satisfying passive user intent in your sub-headers helps your content rank better.

RankWatch SEO IQ suggests the changes your sub-headers require.

Use The PAA Box

The ‘People Also Ask’ box in Google search result pages is the gold mine of the most popular keyword intents used by searchers.

You can get two-way benefits from them.

First, using those search queries as secondary keywords within the content and subheads will help your content rank higher.

Second, you can create a FAQ section using those questions at the end of the main content and provide expert answers.

That will improve your chances of getting a higher rank and significantly boost your page authority.

Conclusion

Marketing is always about targeting and achieving growth.

However, the age-old technique of mastering funnels does not work like before. The main reason behind this is customer behavior is not linear anymore.

It was easier before to anticipate a customer’s search intent by analyzing demographics.

But now, every customer has a different search intent, and no customer journey is identical to another. As a matter of fact, it does not look like a funnel anymore most of the time. 

That makes SEO search intent more essential than ever. 

If you dream of seeing your website’s blue link placed in the first place, you must optimize your content in line with the user’s search intent using a reliable tool like RankWatch.