SEO is one of the best ways to bring a wider audience to your blog or ecommerce storefront. It’s estimated that by 2020, business owners will spend around 82 billion dollars[1] on their SEO marketing plan. In this sense, it’s obvious that SEO will continue to grow in popularity over the years.
We want to take a look at one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization, and that is understanding the intent of your user when they search for something online. It’s important to constantly think about the intent of your potential customers and what may drive them to your website.
Let’s explore user intent and find out how we can use this complex system to help improve your website’s ranking.
What is search intent?
Before we can dive into how to use searcher intent, it’s important to understand what we mean when we use this phrase. In a nutshell, searcher intent is the reason why someone would search for something.
Knowing the intention of your audience, and potential customers mean you’ll be able to plan ahead and pick keywords that will make them more likely to find your site while searching online. Now let’s take a look at the two major types of intent and how you can determine the best approach to your search engine optimization[2].
User intention types
A study out of Hong Kong[3] called “Utilizing search intent in topic ontology-based user profile for web mining” divided the reason people search for something into two categories. You should view the first type of user intention as a wide fishing net. They are looking for something, but on a broad scale based on their keyword choice.