Query Intent & SEO

Talk to many other SEO professionals and you'll hear much discussion about keyword placement, keyword density, backlinks and link sculpting. These were and still are all valid, all useful and definitely all terms and concepts you should be (or at least - become) familiar with.

You see, SEO today has advanced and the recent Google "enhancements" are all driven by three concepts.

These concepts are related to what is known as Query Intent and it goes something like this.

Users perform searches with intent. A user wants to find something in particular, rather than just aimlessly surfing. Knowing what type of queries will be performed helps in determining some of the SEO tactics that needs to be performed.

If you really want to know the science behind the thinking, download yourself a copy of The Transactional Query Identification in Web Search which identifies these three main search query categories in detail.

In summary, Query intent is broken down into three major categories:

• Informational (The user wants to Know something)
• Navigational (The user wants to Go somewhere)
• Transactional (The user wants to Do something)

Why Identifying User Intent Is Important

Identifying the intent behind a user's search queries when driving traffic to your website has huge benefits in determining what keyword phrases should be targeted in your SEO strategy. These keywords can identify what content or functionality could to be added to your website.

A Page 1 ranking on Google for a one word high volume keyword such as "plumber" may bring your website a lot of traffic but this does not necessarily mean that it will bring you any quote requests or policy sales. This "plumber" search query is informational in nature.

A better strategy would be to target a query which is more transactional such as "plumbing quotes in Melbourne". This type of query will likely be the one that drives sales, downloads and conversions. It may have lower traffic volumes and bring in only 10 visits but if these 10 visits result in 5 sales, this is a better result than getting 500 visits that result in only 1 conversion from the term "plumber" – and it may less expensive as well!

So, when thinking about the keywords you want to use for your website (and in Social Media for that matter), think about what it is that's leading visitors to your website. Do they want to know something? Do they want to go somewhere? Or do they want to do something?

View the video and find out precisely what we did with a leading Australian company to both grow the number of visitors to their website as well as increase the number of people taking action on the Number #1 Marketing Objective for the website.