By harnessing the limitless potential of search intent, website owners can attract targeted traffic to their site to boost conversions. Search engines consider various factors while ranking websites, and search intent conversions play a major role in ensuring you outrank your competitors.
Search intent is defined as the action of a user utilizing different search queries to find a specific answer or product. If your target customer is looking for “best donut recipes” and your website content revolves around “Why kids love donuts”, you won’t be fulfilling the search intent of your customers – despite it being a similar topic.
Understanding Search Intent Personas
The first step toward maximizing search intent conversions is to create a Visitor/Buyer Persona. By understanding where the visitor is in the purchase process (for e.g. seeking information or looking for good deals), businesses can obtain targeted traffic and boost conversions.
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Transactional Intent:
Made by visitors to make purchases, for example, “best furniture discounts”. These searches are often made by people who have already made up their mind about what to purchase, but are browsing to see if there are discounts or different alternatives available.
Capitalizing on transactional intent searches could be very useful to businesses online, as customers are only one click away from making a purchase. By incorporating high transactional intent keywords such as “running shoes on sale” or “discounts on kids clothing”, businesses can drive quality traffic to their online stores. This leads to an increase in the number of conversions, thus helping businesses meet their goals.
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Navigational Intent:
To get to a specific website, for example, “craigslist ads”. Many searchers type in brand or website names in search engines because they don’t remember their exact URLs. However, navigational Intent is perhaps the most overlooked form of search intent.
Many businesses make the common mistake of thinking that if a user is searching for a particular brand, using navigational keywords in their SEO strategy might be a waste of time. However, by incorporating competitor names as keywords, businesses can try to capture some of their competitors’ traffic by keeping Meta descriptions such as “The Best Lemlist Alternative”.
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Informational Intent:
These searches are made by users to get information, for example, “Who is Lionel Messi”. Over 14.1% of all google searches are questions with most of them being long tail keywords.
By creating content that is valuable to users, websites can boost their authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines which can help to improve website SEO and boost rankings significantly. However, it is also important to remember that these are not conversion based searches as most users will exit the search engine once they’ve found what they’re looking for.
A great way to include information on your website is by adding a blog section with informative articles about your products. For example, if you sell coffee makers, articles on “Coffee Recipes” and “How to Make the Best Coffee” will help attract relevant traffic to your site. You can also include strategic call to actions within the articles that could help increase conversions on your site.
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Commercial Intent:
These searches are made to compare known brands, for example, “Apple vs. Samsung”. Commercial intent searches are likely made by users looking for a specific type of product, but also looking to research their options.
Searches made with commercial intent could also be location based. “Fast food places near me” or “Best Resorts in Hawaii” are also examples of commercial intent searches. Individuals may also be looking to read reviews to further influence their purchase decision, for example “best coffee maker 2022”
5 Ways to Maximize Search Intent Conversions
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Focus On Creating Value For Your Customers
After creating a search intent persona, focus on creating content around what your customers need. By focusing on what resonates with your customers, your website can attract the right type of audience.
If you post informational blogs, reviews, product descriptions and more, it contributes highly towards improving website rankings. This is because Google’s algorithm takes numerous things into consideration such as bounce rates, click through rates, average session time, repeat visits and more.
Consider adding a blog section to your eCommerce site. By posting articles that are optimized for search engines, you can create awareness for your products and drive targeted traffic to your site.
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Use Effective Landing Pages CTAs and Metadata
Now that you’ve managed to get the right type of visitors on your site, the next step is to utilize an effective “Call to Action” and include the right keywords in your metadata.
Take a step into the mindset of your customers, figure out what they’re looking for and design your landing page with their needs in mind. This gives you an opportunity to keep them on your page longer, and slowly guide them toward your CTAs.
There is no recommended limit for the number of words for your CTA, the only criteria is that it should clearly depict what you’d like users to do. For example “Register for Our Morning Yoga Class” shows the website visitor what the next steps are going to be.
Search engines analyze metadata to understand what your website is all about. This information helps search engines decide which sites to rank when an individual searches for a word or phrase. Title tags are also an equally important factor for search engines to determine the relevance of your site content to the keyword or phrase being searched.
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Utilize High Performing Keywords
This is one of the most important steps of your entire process. Remember, customers use very specific words while browsing search engines. To capitalize on search intent, your keywords must match the type of customers you’re trying to attract.
If you’re looking for customers to make a transaction on your site, utilize transactional keywords. By conducting keyword research with tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush, you can find keywords with high search volume and low difficulty.
Keywords with low difficulty are easy to rank for. By producing high quality content focused on those keywords, businesses can begin driving more quality traffic to their site.
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Analyze Successful Competitors
Enter your selected keywords on search engines and see what websites are performing well. Carefully analyze different elements of the site such as type of content, placement of CTA’s and more.
Tools such as Ahrefs can also provide statistics on the exact keywords your competitors are ranking for. This is a great way of identifying high intent keywords, which produce better results. By adopting and improving the ranking techniques of your competitors, you can easily increase your chances of ranking well.
You could choose to compete on the same keywords as your competitors, but it could take a long time for you to outrank them through this approach. Instead, you can identify keywords with large search volumes that your competitors are not focusing on and try ranking through them.
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Revamp Existing Content To Meet Visitor Requirements
Your content must be informative enough to also answer any follow-up questions that your visitors may have. By creating content that provides value from the start of the purchase process to the finish, you can get more search intent conversions.
You can revamp your existing content by analyzing the type of search intent that would lead customers to your site and optimizing your content to fit your new approach. When a search term is entered on google, a “People Also Ask” section also pops up. This section can give you tons of ideas on what the search trends are.
Website owners can also use tools such as Google Trends to understand what users are searching for world wide. By creating content around those search trends and focusing on trending keywords with high search volume, website owners can drive targeted traffic to their websites.
The tool also offers the ability to filter searches according to country location, which can be very useful if you’re operating an Ecommerce business in different countries. You can select date ranges to obtain data up to the past year.
Conclusion
Understanding your Visitor/Buyer persona and evaluating where they are in their purchase process plays a key role in achieving results. We’d recommend applying the techniques mentioned above, if you’re looking to maximize your search intent conversions.
Remember, the important thing is to provide searchers with what they’re looking for. If your goal is to produce conversions, using transactional keywords such as “discounted watches” would ensure that search engines display your website to searchers looking to make a purchase. Similarly, if your goal is to generate awareness, creating high value informational content and utilizing relevant keywords can help drive quality traffic to your site.
