Learning your consumer intent through SERP data

Quotes

• “We have seen a lot of volatility in terms of how Google interprets intent and the websites that are winning in those spaces. From the broadest lens, when I think about consumer intent, the first thing that I want to look at are the elements that how Google is interpreting it in terms of navigational, informational, and transactional intent and what that will give you is an insight on where they are at in the buying process and where you should be competing.” -Tyson

• “Not all traffic to the website should be valued the same. Some of it is going to be very high funnel but thats really not going to have a big impact on your bottom line, so in that case you will be best interested in transactional queries where there is a higher chance of having a conversion rate.” -Tyson

• “There are two main bodies. One is classifying keywords into intent and that is something that we do within the Searchmetrics platform. We are doing that through looking at the ranking URLs for those keywords, classifying those URLs and that gives us a window into how Google is seeing and interpreting those topics.” -Tyson

• “The second element of intent is what SERP elements and what SERP integrations Google is putting into that body of keywords. That will give you another clue of the type of information that consumers are finding valuable but also what you need to do to compete in that individual with that specific category in the SERPs.” -Tyson

• “It seems like the play here is to reverse engineer what Google is thinking about a given keyword and it seems like where you are going through your keyword set and understanding the content that they are putting on the page whether its FAQs, maps, quotes, product search, videos et al, that gives you the sense of what signals Google has tested.” -Ben

• “There are also some scenarios where its just a hodge-podge. Google throws everything on the page. The coronavirus page has videos, left navs and right navs, there was a lot of different stuff on that page.” -Ben

• “The biggest recommendation I have there is thats the value of having the broader lens. If you are looking at a small set of keywords, you are only going to get the immediate piece and thats where you will see the most volatility. Your best ally, in a sense, is volume. The larger you set out the volume, the more that you can normalize those micro-fluctuations and those changes on the very time-sensitive terms live COVID.” -Tyson

• “One interesting aspect of this category or body of KPIs vs some of the previous topics we had this week is this something going to a more tactical level. This section in particular is the most hands-on, most tactical. The area that you are able to use for content strategy or differentiating page templates, or getting more to the grassroots level. Thats the most powerful and really interesting thing about leveraging search data for larger business applications. You can use these parts to both go up in the organization or use them as well to go down.” -Tyson

• “The greatest misunderstanding by far is that search data can only be used for SEO or PPC. I think that is grossly invalid. Search data can actually be this gold mine of market research information but then also how can take that same information, take the facets and thats when you can really leverage it down tobeing more tactical and hands-on.” -Tyson

• “My biggest takeaway from this week is on the business strategist and the business mindset. Search data can provide you with visibility into the size of your business, the trends in your business, and who are the relevant players and also specifically what your customers are thinking and what factors into their decision-making process.” -Ben