The release of Google’s latest update means every SEO strategy needs to be reviewed and refreshed, with the intention of users when they make a search becoming more important than ever.
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What does a search mean?
User intent is changing SEO, because it means Google isn’t just looking at the words in the search box, but it is trying to decipher what the user intended when making that search. For instance, if someone searches for “chicken tikka” do they want to order a takeaway online or to compile a shopping list of ingredients?
Google wants to know the context of a user’s search and has to rate each piece of possible content against how fully it meets the intent of the user. According to Karina Tama on Forbes, this means Google will consider whether their query shows something they want to do, something they want to know or somewhere they want to go.
Many digital marketing service providers tap into user intent expertise from White Label SEO Services from agencies such as Digitel http://digi-tel.co.uk/gloucestershire-seo-services/white-label-seo-services. They can help you determine how user intent should influence the content strategy for your website, so that your website will feature strongly on search engine results pages (SERPs). So for example, if a business is selling ingredients for chicken tikka online, it will need strong product listing pages, but it should also consider recipe content pages that might be the sort of thing that Google is looking to show people who they think want to know about chicken tikka first, and then do some shopping for ingredients later.
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Device gives some direction
Google will likely make an educated guess about whether a user intends to do something or know something or go somewhere, based on the device they have used to search. Mobile phone searches are often used for knowing something through browsing information and computer searches for doing something such as shopping. If a user has used voice activated devices to make a search, Google knows that they’re very often looking to go somewhere.
Responding to the user’s intention when searching will mean you need to employ a variety of relevant SEO tactics to convince Google that your site will engage those users in the right ways and that showing it highly in SERPs will give users a good experience.
Context-less searches and the brand template
Intent is hardest to read when a search carries no context. Someone typing a person’s name could want a historical reference, an address, contact details, a line of work or a dating profile, and nothing in the query says which. Yet these bare searches are often where audiences form their first opinion of a brand.
Search engines group and classify queries so they can return what users usually want. The side effect is that content tied to a brand can keep appearing long after it stopped being relevant, including negative stories from events long past. The algorithm is not hostile; it is working from the information it has, and sometimes that leads to the wrong results.
The answer is to understand the patterns, or templates, behind the searches that matter to you. Research the data behind those queries and study how results behave for brands similar to yours. Then plan targeted content that fits what the search engine is primed to show, rather than publishing post after post in the hope that something sticks.