Focusing on searcher’s intent

Focusing on searcher’s intent – Alexa Flash Briefing Skill (SEO Tips)

Hello. Thanks for listening to SEO Tips today.

So my SEO tip for today is focused on making sure you’re clear about your searcher’s intent before writing any copy.

If you have been doing SEO for a while and not staying up with the latest Google algorithm updates, you might still be using a keyword tool and just picking keywords and then just using them in your writing. Google has made significant changes to its algorithm so it’s now more focused on becoming an intent engine versus a keyword matching engine. Searcher’s intent means the actual question that the person had in their head when they used those keywords in either spoke them or type them into a search engine. The only way you truly know what the intent is for a particular set of keywords is to go Google search ( ideally using incognito or with an SEO tool so that it’s not personalized to you) and you put it in the keyword and actually see what the results are that come back.

A couple of things you need to do once you’re looking at the search results. You need to look at the results and determine if you have a chance of ranking. Certainly, there are some queries and search results they (like medical ones) where it’s really clear there’s a set of authoritative websites that come up there all high Authority, high trust and you are a smaller player there’s probably not a chance that you can rank for those keywords. But depending on your industry or keyword that you’re looking at there might be an opportunity for you to rank.

 The second thing you need to do is actually take a look at all the pages that are ranking and ask yourself this one really clear question:

“Is what I am writing good enough and better than what’s currently ranking?”

John Mueller multiple times (when he’s asked what does it take to rank) recommends people do look at what’s currently ranking and determine if you are better than those results.

So you need to look at all the different pages

• how long the copy is 
• the topics they cover 
• whether or not they have calls to action –
• whether they use images or graphs 
• basically look for any sort of pattern like that that you can see

I’ll give you an example.  

I once took a look at a keyword set for a company in the senior resources sector. All of the sites that were ranking had an option for you to adjust the text size on the website. This makes tons of sense that the audience would need that feature. Know, you would not know that unless you popped open all of the results that were currently appearing for those terms.

So that’s my tip for you today – really focus on the searcher’s intent before you start writing any online copy. 

Thanks for listening today. Come back tomorrow for more SEO tips.