What Are the Different Kinds of Search Intent?
There are four main kinds of search intent: informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial investigation. Understanding each type of intent will help you create content that appeals to the right users.
In informational searches, the searcher wants to learn more about a particular topic. This can be anything from a recipe for a certain dish to how to use a particular piece of equipment.
The results for these types of searches tend to be highly condensed and informative. These results will most likely consist of a Wikipedia page, dictionary, or a blog post that provides additional resources and background information on the topic.
Another common feature of informational search intent keywords is that they’ll often include a featured snippet, which shows up before a link on the search engine results page. These snippets can be a large driver of traffic to your site.
They’ll also tend to include knowledge grabs, which are similar to featured snippets but focus on specific questions. These are a great way to gain the trust of searchers and build your authority in the industry.
A good tip for optimizing for this intent is to include the question you’re answering in your title and URL. This makes it clear that you’re creating content to answer a user’s query, and helps them find you quickly.
You can also incorporate relevant image tags in your content to make it easier for searchers to digest the information on your pages. Images can be more engaging than text alone, and they’ll boost your click-through rate as well!
For this intent, you’ll want to optimize your content for a high-quality content score. This will ensure that Google recognizes you as a credible source of information and rank you higher in search.
Unlike informational queries, transactional queries tend to be low-funnel, meaning that people making these searches are almost ready to convert and purchase the product they’re searching for. These users are also likely to have a lot of research ahead of them, so it’s important to create value-focused content that will help them make their final decision.
They will also often use a variety of SERP features to indicate their transactional intent, such as shopping carousels and AdWords ads. They’ll also be a bit more likely to look for reviews of the products they’re interested in.
While there are a few ways to determine which search intent your target audience is using, the best way is to understand what’s happening on their Google search results pages. These results are based on factors like their location, language, time of day, and device used to search.
Determining the right search intent for your brand can be a challenge, but it’s essential to create high-quality content that will help you satisfy these users and improve your rankings. You’ll need to perform keyword research to find out what search terms are driving the most traffic to your site and what types of content are being ranked high for those keywords.