Let’s talk about a concept that is relatively new in SEO – search intent. Now, this concept combines the sciences of human psychology, artificial intelligence, semantics, and a dash of sociology, hoping to gain a better understanding of exactly what the customer is looking for. The user’s intent wasn’t the center of our attention until recently when Google made their algorithms more sophisticated when the era of not just matching raw text lines to each other, but rather to parse the text’s meaning as well as a smarter search. Having said that, let’s take a look at how you can use search ‘intent’ for keyword research;

What the user wants when searching the web – there are several different theories of modeling user intent, which we put down into the following categories;

• Information – where the user just wants to know something
• Transaction – wants to sign up, purchase, or subscribe to something
• Navigation – want to visit a specific website
• Directional – want to find a certain location for something.

When searching for something, there are specific keywords a user uses so that Google understands what it is the user is looking for. It is by narrowing down the intent that helps Google bring up the websites it thinks you want.

Putting users’ intent to work for you – no matter the kind of business you ran, as long as you are using content marketing with SEO keywords, you are bound to benefit when you address users’ intent in the site’s text. Find out what your users are searching for, utilizing an SEO analysis tool that includes keyword research capabilities.

“High-intent” transaction keywords – now, when a user wants to do a transaction on the line, their search on Google runs a natural course, which goes from lower to higher intent, evidenced by the type of words they use along with the product. They start with words like compare, review, best, or top, which means that they aren’t sure of what they want to buy. But then they move to use words like discount, buy, vendor, deal, price, sale, and shipping, which proves that the user already made up his mind. The thing is, targeting the high-intent words more will most likely bring you more immediate sales. When users want to spend money, you want to be first in line.