Keywords: search intent, keyword intent, intent keywords, keyword intents
Identifying the True Search Intent when someone searches for something and satisfying that intent is the most crucial aspect of content creation and if you don’t get this right, there is no point in creating that content because, most likely, it won’t rank.
So, this lesson is all about helping you to identify the true intent of the keyword you are targeting. We’ll start with a simple exercise then I will show you a few methods to easily identify the keyword intent.
Ler’s say that the keyword you are targetting is: “Do you need talent to play the guitar?”, when you extend the keyword to “Do you need talent to play the guitar? – 7 Guitar Tips for Beginners”. Your presumed search intent would be “Looking for Guitar Tips” or B the person searching doubts their ability and they “Need Assurance That Anyone Can Play Guitar”. Lock the answer in your mind.
I want to show you that this is an actual use case:
A beginner writer, someone who has not written a blog article in their life, came to me with A. It was a 2,500 word article and she wondered why the article didn’t rank for the keyword “Do you need talent to play guitar?”. Her angle was to provide tips because that’s what she thinks people are looking for. I’ve given her advice to change it to B. And her article started to rank.
So, nailing the search intent and creating content to serve it is the most important element of optimizing for search engines.
SEO, never try to optimise your content for two primary search intents. Only focus on one, as I’ve said before.
So now, I want to share with you, some methods for identifying a keyword search intent. It boils down to some research and common sense.
Search the Targetted Keyword
The first method is to simply do a search on your targetted keywords. So let’s say I want to write an article about “How to Find the Right Affiliate Programs”. Now, before we even look at the search results. How would you write your article? Is it going to be an Informational Intent post, or a commercial Intent post?
Would that be a list of top-paying affiliate programs to take up a huge chuck of your content. I don’t know about you but, most beginners would think about adding a list of top-paying affiliate programs in the content and they would make it a Commercial Intent article.
Let’s search for “How to find the right affiliate programs”, the featured snippet doesn’t seem like it would have a list of affiliate programs, and when we view the article, we see it is an informational post. It answers the search intent. Let’s go to the second, open it up to see if there is a list of high-paying affiliate programs. No, it, clearly, shares tips to find the right programs.
Further down the list is a high-authority domain. Why is this not ranking at the top? It is because it talks about a list of high-paying programs instead of answering the question.
Now, the thing is, the big authority sites aren’t matches because that don’t have a commercial interest in writing content on that topic. But one of their related topics happens to rank for that keyword. That is an opportunity for you if you think about it.
When you are doing keyword research, and you happen to see a situation like this, where the lower authority aites are ranking higher than the high authority sites. You know you have a chance if you nail it on the search intent.
So, whatever content structures or ideas you are thinking of adding. Validate them by doing a simple search on Google. If your idea is something new that no one has talked about then use common sense to consider whether the searcher will find the new information useful as a result of searching for that keyword.
Ask AI to Identify Search Intent
Another method for identifying search intent: asking an AI. If you didn’t know, Rankmath offers over 40 AI tools for free and it is integrated into WordPress.
The AI tool that will allow you to chat with an AI is RankBot, On the Content AI module, click on the Chat Tab you can ask a question like “When people are searching for the keyword “How to find the right Affiliate Programs”, what are people expecting from the search results?” Hit Send and it will provide you with the Search Intent.
In this sense, you should be writing two articles. One is to teach people how to find the right affiliate programs and the other is a list of affiliate programs. Link the pages to one another. Never put content with two different intents on the same page. It used to work but, not anymore.
Anyway, if you have a free rank math account and you have connected the site to the account, we will inject 750 free credits into your account evety month, forever. Every word generated by the AI is one credit, so feel free to use it.
But if you want to save the credits for something else, you can ask ChatGPT, you can use ChatGPT for free.
