You need to focus your marketing efforts on search intent: here’s why

Search intent is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO). Do you know what it means? For the most straightforward answer on this, have a look at the blog post Moz published in 2007 “Segmenting search intent“. Basically all that it means is that every search can be categorised in either navigational queries with the intent of visiting a specific website, informational queries that focus only on information, commercial investigation queries which is only for research, and transactional queries that focuses on the intent on taking an action.

Google isn’t big, it’s massive. And to take advantage of getting your business a top position organically, you need to focus your search engine optimisation and social media marketing campaigns on search intent to make sure you are using the right tactics to generate qualified traffic.

It’s a fact that nearly every purchase online begins with a search. Google is the behemoth of search online and currently they generate over 100 billion searches per month. That is 3.3 billion searches per day. In order for Google to index a website page, the page needs a URL. Google has found over 30 trillion unique address on the web that consist of websites, web apps, and other properties connected to the web. Everyday Google crawls over 20-billion websites to find new and updated information to provide the most relevant content to searchers.

With all the searches and crawling happening everyday, Google has to ensure that their search algorithm is up to date to provide their users with the best user experience and to make sure their content is up to date. To get this right, Google has to constantly update and make changes to their algorithm. It’s estimated that Google updates its search algorithm between 500 and 600 times a year and all of these updates has a direct impact on SEO and business.

Social media and Google
In the last couple of years, social media started playing a huge role in the way people search for answers and solutions online. There are many articles, books, whitepapers and blog posts about “social signals” and a lot has changed over the last year or two, but one thing to take note of is that Twitter will directly be integrated into Google’s search this month.

What does this mean? It means that your SEO and social media marketing campaigns should be combined into one strategy and they shouldn’t function in their own separate silos. They should help each other and the same goes with any other marketing campaign that you have. How can your traditional marketing strategies strengthen your online marketing campaigns? By focusing on intent and giving your target audience the correct content that they are looking for. Base your online marketing campaigns on specific intent around your target audience.

Benefits of focusing on search intent
Here’s a couple of benefits of basing your marketing campaigns on specific intent:

• Increase organic rankings
• Increased social media engagement score (key metric with social media)
• Increase your online credibility
• Increased trust
• Increase your digital footprint (visibility)
• Real time community management
• Social media ROI (measure exactly how much ROI your social media campaigns are generating)
• Increased conversions
• Reach your business goals

Even though the concept of combining SEO and social media is still new to many, you can be sure that in a couple of months it will become the norm as more businesses realise that you cannot focus on standalone SEO and social media strategies anymore.