Dealing with Fragmented User Intent — Kevin Indig // G2

Quotes

• “For instance, when you Google the word side cut it can be a very ambiguous query. Meaning, there are a lot of possibilities that people actually want in terms of what their search is or user intent.” -Kevin

• “The thing that we have been observing for a couple of years now is that Google shows different SERP features to make sure that it covers whatever need or intent that people have. We call this fragmented intent. Its when Google shows different SERP features.” -Kevin

• “Google does that because first of all, they serve a lot of user intent but second of all, they also iterate over time. Meaning the more people click on something, the more they will show that and adjust their SERP features.” -Kevin

• “The way that you can go about this is, you can take a rank tracker, like Searchmetrics for example, and you can export all the SERP features for a query and then you can cluster these SERP features according to different user intent. Thats where it needs a bit of a subjective measure but I think it works out pretty well.” -Kevin

• “My takeaway here is that there is a notion of keyword maturity for Google and that sometimes Google has search results and they just dont really know what the user intent is, so they are going to put everything on the page and they are going to look at the user behavior, understand what is clicked on and that is whats going to help them modify the page next time.” -Ben

• “When you have super fragmented user intent, in this case, you will adapt your content to what makes the most sense for your site. Then, you would want to pay very close attention to how that user intent changes over time.” -Kevin

• “When you create a spreadsheet with an overview of the fragmented user intent for all of your most important queries, what you want to do is update that on an on-going basis at least on a monthly basis to understand how intent changes over time.” -Kevin

• “You really have to stay true to your business. When you are working at a fragmented experience, you really have to understand what is going to be true to the end experience that is going to end up driving the most conversions.” -Ben

• “Think critically about the format that your content comes in and adapt if necessary or if there is a benefit to it. Sometimes you might rank well with your written content but then all of a sudden Google shows a carousel of videos and that should make you think about if you should make a video.” -Kevin

• “When you are looking at fragmented user intent, this is not just something that is important because its what Google shows on the page, it means that the consumers at large dont have a clear understanding of what they are looking for in a search term.” -Ben

• “First of all, you want to monitor how SERP features change over time for the keywords that are relevant to you. Thats the first step and its important because it gives you an idea of whether or not you are on the right track or not and if your traffic might diminish over time.” -Kevin

• “Second, you want to regularly export your keyword with SERP features and then classify the SERP features into the user intent that you think is best.” -Kevin

• “The third case is you want to make sure that you repeat that every month so that you understand how the search intent for the same keyword changes over time. Then, as a fourth step, I would say, you want to monitor your traffic closely and see if you get more or less traffic depending on whether Google shows more or fewer SERP features for your keywords.” -Kevin