SEO and User Intent

Human beings are motivated to utilize search engines for varying purposes. When we look something up on the internet, there can be many intentions leading us to search. Understanding user intent is important for any person working in marketing and SEO. When a marketer understands the reason behind certain searches, this enables them to position content that is most relevant to their customers.

There are three specific intentions behind human beings’ search. The first being for informational purposes, which typically involves finding additional material and data about a topic of interest. The second is the navigational aspect. Typically, this involves a user being led to a certain site either from a different site or within the site itself. Lastly, the third intent can be transactional in nature. The obvious intent behind this one is that the person searching is trying to purchase something behind a certain search term.

It is then Google’s goal to display the most relevant information for the user based upon what they searched. The better the quality of the content, the higher the Google ranking for the company. Another crucial point to touch on, is that search engines are not looking at individual words. Search engines review the connection between all words of a search term. The context is what’s key. Companies need to “orient their content around keywords that correspond to the user intent that they want to serve” (“User/Search Intent Defintion” 1).

One particular tool that can be helpful in this process is Searchmetrics Context Experience (SCE), which essentially combines measured data with the creative process of writing. It then displays “semantically” related topics and positions them as search intentions. It then divides topics into four distinct phases that a potential buyer goes through during their purchase. The first being perception, the second evaluation, then purchase, and lastly customer loyalty. SCE will then indicate, which questions the words must answer in order to meet the users intent. This is one of many tools that can be exercised to better understand user intent.