SEO TIP: CONTENT AND AUDIENCE SEARCH INTENT

What is your audience?

The audience is your target audience, the people you want to reach on your website and make a certain action on it.

For example, in e-commerce, the main audience is people looking to buy.

If that same e-commerce has a blog where product reviews are made ... the audience of the blog is people who do not want to buy, they just want to keep abreast of developments, know which products are better, and in the future may be potential buyers.

It is important to emphasize how important it is to know what is the "intention of your audience". In e-commerce it usually doesn't matter if you have millions of visitors if none of them buys from you. This may be due to design/usability problems of the web, but in many cases, it may be that you are positioned on keywords that do not interest you, and therefore people enter and leave the web when they do not find what they are looking for.

Every client wants their website to be at the top of the google results for their audience. To achieve this strategically, I recommend keyword research.

Finding the right keywords can be a complicated endeavour, Keywords are the words and phrases in your content that make it possible for users (your audience) to find your website when they use search engines like Google.

While ranking for high-level keywords with high search volumes can be great, they often provide little in the way of actual audience intent. 

Let's look at 2 examples:

Someone searches for the following:

"Universities."

If you are a higher education institution, you probably want to rank for the keyword "Universities". However, ranking for this particular keyword gives you very little information regarding the person searching for the Google intent.

Search intent is the ultimate goal of the person using a search engine. Their intent in this context may be to find answers, compare services, or purchase products.

What page on my site should rank for this keyword? What does the person searching on Google plan to do with the information they find? Are they in the research phase or are they considering applying to school?

As a site owner, it becomes very difficult to determine what to do with people who visit your site through keyword searches like this.

Let's take a look at another example. A person searches Google for the following:

"computer science colleges near me with an accelerated program."

While the search volume (number of searches performed each month) for this particular keyword may be significantly less than the above, the wording is very actionable.

Based on this search, we know several things about the person:

1. They are looking for local universities.
2. They are interested in computer science.
3. They need an accelerated program

Search phrases like these, known as long tail or "long tail" keywords, make it very easy to provide Google searchers with content that meets their needs.

Following this "long tail" example, the recommendation is that you create a dedicated page on "the degree your university offers in accelerated adult-oriented computer science" for users searching for this term to find exactly what they are looking for.

If you don't have an accelerated program, I recommend you create an optimized page (I'll surely do another post explaining this in detail) for the same long-tail phrase but emphasizing the benefits of a four-year degree.

Long-tail keywords like these offer greater insight into people's search intent. And, based on their intent, we can determine what actions a user is likely to take in response to the information you present, which in turn informs how you write this content.

Keyword research

There are many excellent tools available to perform what is known as keyword research. There are paid tools such as Ahrefs (my favourite) and Moz Pro, as well as free tools such as Google Ads Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest.

Clarify that these tools give estimated and statistical data, they should not be taken as the absolute truth. But they help us to know what to focus on to obtain results with the minimum effort.

With these tools, we can see that the search volume for the keyword "Universities" is quite high and the market demand is quite high. Running ads for this keyword would cost us more than $3 per click on our website.

We also see the sites we will be competing with to rank for this particular keyword. The tool also provides us with other useful keyword suggestions, as well as the volume and SEO difficulty of each.

They also provide us with related keywords, questions, prepositions and comparisons that often have lower SEO difficulty, giving us alternative keywords and phrases that are being searched for and maybe easier to rank for.

Now let's look at our long-tail keyword.

A very important detail to keep in mind here is that a 0 in search volume does not necessarily mean that this keyword does not receive any searches per month. It simply means that the search volume is so low, the amount of times this phrase is searched for per month, that it really can't be measured accurately.

In many cases, long-tail searches do not have enough searches to have a solid base of statistical data, which makes these tools unable to tell you the exact volume.

However, you can see the SEO difficulty. There is almost no competition when trying to rank for this keyword. Taking a look at the competitor sites that qualify for this keyword, we can see that one even has a page with more than 700 shared resources on social networks. This means that while this long tail keyword is not frequently searched for, the content found is very valuable to those who have searched for it.

This high-level overview of keyword research shows that the best course of action is one that involves both long-tail and short-tail keywords. While the short tail has the greatest reach, the long tail has more potential for action.

So where do I start?

Long-tail or short-tail keywords?

If you're just starting, it's best to position yourself with longtail or long-tail keyword searches. Here you will find less competition and you will be able to rank much easier in the first positions of Google. You just have to keep in mind that you will have fewer visits, but they will usually be of higher quality (they have a clear search intent). And the same happens with paid ads, they are usually cheaper.

On the other hand, if you already have a website that is well-positioned in many longtails... the next step is to fight for generic words (short tail). They cost much more to appear in the top positions of Google, but they bring a lot of traffic to your website.