Understanding searcher intent
What are people looking for? When performing SEO work, it is common to start with researching relevant keywords and analyzing the competition. Before conducting keyword research, you should understand what the searcher is looking to accomplish with their query.
The person searching expects to see the most relevant results first.
4 main types of search intent results
- The searcher has a specific question in mind and is looking for a definite answer. “For example, if you’re looking for tips on how to care for a dog, you might want to check out a site like DogVacay.com.” For example, if you want tips on how to care for a dog, DogVacay.com would be a good place to look.
- Navigational intent is when someone is looking for a specific website to navigate to. Other examples include Facebook, Airbnb, Amazon, and similar login pages.
- User is looking for a product or service to buy. For example, “Country Brook Petz Premium Nylon Dog Collar” or “website SEO services” are two things that can be defined as a keyword.
- Looking for a product or service that fits your needs. Some examples of keywords that people might use when searching for a product or service online include “best dog collars” or “best keyword research tools.”
The searcher’s intent can be identified by checking the current top 10 results of your keywords. If you want to rank in the top 10 results, you’ll need to create the right type of quality content. The results page contains images, videos, and text.
4 main types of content
- Informational intent queries are questions seeking to learn about something. This can be done through articles, blog posts, tutorials, videos, and regular website pages.
- Navigational intent queries: Display the exact website pages.
- Most queries with transactional intent are looking for specific product pages or product categories.
- Commercial investigation queries typically turn up review articles, comparison pages, listings, and other similar results.
Keyword research basics
How to do keyword research
You probably have a few ideas about how people search for your product, service, or content. It is beneficial to start with one target keyword or phrase. Generate more keywords and phrases by using initial ideas.
Generating keyword ideas
Think of a phrase that your customers would use to find you, and enter it into Google. You should start to see related keywords and phrases that might be relevant to you.
We can use this process to figure out how to care for our dogs. For example, if we want to know how to take care of our dogs, we can use this process.
If you type a phrase into Google, a list of related searches and content ideas will appear. This could be useful for coming up with content marketing ideas for your website.
Bonus: SEO competitive analysis
When you visit the websites that are at the top of the search results for your query, take a moment to look at the types of websites they are. This will give you a better understanding of the competition.
Check what kind of websites and how big they are:
- Is it a small business or blog with a couple of dozen blog posts?
- Is it a Wikipedia article?
- Is it an Amazon product category page?
If you’re only looking at the top 10 results for your query and all of them are from big companies like Amazon, Ebay, Apple, and Best Buy, then you might want to try using less competitive keywords and focus on getting traffic from several less popular long-tail keywords instead.
Here are 2 free tools to help you grasp the size of your competition:
1. SimilarWeb Chrome extension measures the traffic of the website. If a competitor website is not receiving much traffic, then it will not have much value. The following estimates are rough comparisons to your competition and are NOT meant to be used for calculations.
2. The DA and PA metrics that MozBar provides are meant to imitate Google’s algorithms as accurately as possible. These metrics are then used to assign a score to your website or page. The more authoritative a website is considered, the higher the score is. Score close to one hundred make it difficult to compete with websites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon.
Websites with a score of 0-30 are more likely to be ranked higher. This is not to be used for calculations, but rather to get a general idea of your competition. This is not a ranking factor.
Keywords on the website (on-page SEO)
Meta titles and descriptions (title tags)
When creating web pages, there is an option available to add a meta title and description. This can be beneficial in helping to improve the visibility of your pages. This is the text that will be visible in the search results.
Google ranks your website based on the meta title, which is the first thing potential visitors see to decide whether or not to click on your search result. The ideal length for a meta title is 65 characters or less so that it is not cut off on search engine results pages. A meta description checker can help you see how long your text is and how it will appear on Google.
It is important to include your target keyword near the beginning of the title. Your page’s meta title should accurately describe its main purpose.
Your meta description will not affect your website’s ranking on Google, but it may influence your visitors’ decision to click or skip your search result.
How to create an effective meta description
- The best way to keep your tweet from being cut off is to keep it under 155 characters. That way, everyone who sees it will be able to read the whole thing.
- Include your target keyword and try adding a couple of supporting keywords (keywords in the meta description that match the ones of the search query will be bolded).
- Keep the text informative and useful to the reader. If the searcher clicks on your page, they will find information about your product or service, as well as a call to action (CTA). Call to action phrases like “Visit now,” “Read now!,” “Check to find out,” etc. encourage readers to take a desired action.
When “Queries Deserve Freshness”
He said that “a search for [the latest hurricane] has a very different freshness need than [pictures of the former President of the United States].” Amit Singhal, a former Google Fellow, explained that different searches have different freshness needs. For example, a search for the latest hurricane news will need different results than a search for pictures of the former President of the United States.
This means that Google looks at how often your document is being updated and how recently it was updated to score it for certain types of searches.
Singhal describes the types of keyword searches most likely to require fresh content:
- Recent events or hot topics: “occupy oakland protest” “nba lockout”
- Regularly recurring events: “NFL scores” “dancing with the stars” “exxon earnings”
- Frequent updates: “best slr cameras” “subaru impreza reviews”
Google may determine exactly which queries require fresh content by monitoring the web and their own huge warehouse of data, including:
- Search volume: Are queries for a particular term spiking (i.e. “Earthquake Los Angeles”)?
- News and blog coverage: If a number of news organizations start writing about the same subject, it’s likely a hot topic.
- Social media: A spike in mentions of a particular topic may indicate the topic is “trending.”
Different search queries may require different types of content. Some queries may need fresh content, while other queries may be better served by older content.
Fresh is often better, but not always. (More on this later.)
There are ten factors that Google takes into account when determining the freshness of your content. Images courtesy of my favorite graphic designer, Dawn Shepard.
1. Freshness by inception date
A web page’s “freshness” score is determined by its creation date, which decreases over time. A higher freshness score means that a piece of content is more likely to appear in search results for relevant queries, but this score goes down as the content becomes outdated.
This is when Google first becomes aware of the document, for example when Googlebot first indexes it or finds a link to it.
2. Amount of change influences freshness: How Much
The freshness of a piece of content also has an impact on its SERP ranking. The freshness of content on a webpage or domain affects its SERP ranking. Regularly updated content is scored differently for freshness by search engines than content that does not change. In this case, the amount of change on your webpage affects how it is ranked.
A small change to a single sentence will have a less noticeable impact on freshness than a larger change to the main text.
Google may choose to ignore small changes. If I update a hyperlink on a web page, I will usually also change the text near it. This will make it more likely that Google will take notice of the change. Consider the following:
“In order to not update every link’s freshness from a minor edit of a tiny unrelated part of a document, each updated document may be tested for significant changes (e.g., changes to a large portion of the document or changes to many different portions of the document) and a link’s freshness may be updated (or not updated) accordingly.”
3. Changes to core content matter more: How important
The changes that are made in the important areas of the document will show that the document is fresh, whereas the changes made in the less important areas will not have as much of an impact.
Less important content includes:
- JavaScript
- Comments
- Advertisements
- Navigation
- Boilerplate material
- Date/time tags
Conversely, “important” content often means the main body text.
Changing things like your sidebar links or footer copy probably won’t be seen as a signal that your site is fresh.
This issue is about timestamps on a page. There is disagreement about how effective it is for webmasters to frequently update timestamps, sometimes in order to create the illusion of newness. This means that it is important to keep the actual page content updated and fresh.
4. The rate of document change: How often
Content that changes regularly is given a different score than content that only changes occasionally.
The homepage of the New York Times changes a lot from day to day.
A link that appears on the Yahoo homepage for just one day may be considered less important than a link that stays on the homepage for a longer period of time.
5. New page creation
Instead of revising individual pages, fresh websites often add completely new pages over time. This keep the website looking modern and relevant without needing to do a complete redesign. Blogs that add new pages more frequently generally have a higher freshness score than those that add content less frequently.
Some webmasters suggest that you add 20-30% new pages to your site each year. In my opinion, this is not necessary as long as you do other things to show that your content is fresh, such as keeping it up-to-date and regularly getting new links.
6. Rate of new link growth signals freshness
This means that some signals that show a piece of content is fresh are not limited to the page itself. There are many signals that can show how fresh something is, and they can be very effective.
If a webpage sees an increase in the number of links pointing to it, this could indicate that it is becoming more relevant to search engines. For example, if people start linking to your personal website because you’re about to get married, your site could be seen as more relevant and up to date (as far as this current event goes.)
7. Links from fresh sites pass fresh value
Links from sites with high freshness scores can improve the freshness score of the linked site.
com A link from a page that hasn’t been updated in a while may not be as valuable as a link from a newer page. For example, a link from the homepage of Wired.com would be more valuable than a link from an old, static site. Justin Briggs coined this FreshRank.
8. Traffic and engagement metrics may signal freshness
Google tracks which results users choose from the list it presents them and how much time they spend on each one in order to gauge the freshness and relevance of the results.
If people are regularly selecting a search result that is lower down on the list and they spend more time on that page than on other results, it is likely that the result is more current and applicable.
This might mean that click-through rate is a ranking factor, but that is not always the case. A more accurate interpretation would be that the increased clicks show Google that there is a lot of interest in the topic, and that this page is a good match for what the user is looking for.
I strongly suggest reading Eric Enge’s thorough article on CTR’s impact on ranking if you want a more comprehensive understanding of this trend.
9. Changes in anchor text may devalue links
Anchor text pointing to a web page will change along with any drastic changes in the subject of the page.
If you purchase a domain about racing cars and then change the format to focus on baking, the new anchor text will eventually shift from cars to cookies.
If Google sees that your site has changed a lot since the last time it was crawled, it may decide that the old anchor text is now outdated and devalue those older links.
