Search Intent and SEO. A practical guide

Search Intent and SEO. A practical guide
It is practically obvious by now to say that getting organic traffic is something increasingly complex and that these are no longer the days of the now legendary Ten Blue Links.

However, the transformation of Google from a simple search engine to a complex “database of answers” and the exponential growth of SERP features, which tend to keep users in the search engine itself, is just one of the reasons why the work of SEO has become more complex.

If we look at the mission statement of Google, we can easily understand the “most honest” reason why of the complexity of achieving the most organic visibility possible now:

Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it useful and accessible to everyone.

To be useful and offer the best answer, the first thing to do is to really understand why a person is asking a question or, in search engine terms, understand a person’s search intent.

This need for understanding is central to any marketing discipline.

In fact, if we do not know what our target audience wants and what are the pain points, which they want to see resolved, we will hardly be able to direct our messages in the best and most effective way.

In the case of SEO, however, there is a special peculiarity: our message passes through a medium – the search engines – that ask the same questions as we do about their users.

This means that if, on the one hand, it is true that we must know the desires and pain points of our users (God forbid!), on the other hand, however, we must know what the search engines determine these users want and search as an answer to their questions.

In this post, I will not go into the details of patents and papers (if you are interested in them, I invite you to follow and read Bill Slawski and Dawn Anderson). On the contrary, I will present empirical methods that some will consider “unscientific”, but which in reality have a lot of practical science backing it and proved to be correct and effective in identifying the search intent of my clients’ users.

Contents [hide]

1 Fundamental concepts
1.1 Search Intent
1.2 Relevance
1.3 SERP
2 Search Intent and Search Journey
3 I Want to Go micro-moment, or about the Navigational Search Intents
3.1 How can we tell if a query implies an I Want to Go Search Intent?
4 I Want to Know and I Want to Do micro-moments, or about the Informational Search Intents
4.1 What kind of information people is looking for most with their informational queries?
4.2 How to tell if a query has an informational Search Intent (and what kind)
4.2.1 Know Simple
4.2.2 Classic informational
4.2.3 Fresh informational
4.2.4 Visual informational
5 I Want to Buy Micro Moment, or the different shapes of the Transactional Search Intent
5.1 “I am ready to buy”
5.2 “I’m ready to buy, but I need help…”
6 TL;DR