Understanding the search intent to improve your ranking
Talking about SEO we can often hear the expression search intent, one of the fundamental keys to engage users and please search engines, but for almost 20 years now (since the expression was coined the first time) we usually just mention the categories Informational, Transactional, Navigational or Commercial. Yet, the concept cannot be reduced to this simple classification, which offers no practical and useful information to those who want to know how to create a content that has real opportunities to rank, and only by understanding the true meaning of search intent and learning to build content around what users really need can we actually improve the ranking of our pages on Google.
What is the search intent
With the expression search intent we refer to what is behind every search on Google or on any other search engine.
When using a search engine, in fact, people have something specific in mind – answers to their problems, information on the services available, offers or reviews on the product they are interested in and so on – and search intent, also called user intent or audience intent, is just the explanation of why a user ran an online search using that query.
In other words, it is the primary requirement that drove a person to use Google and do a search, it is like a spark, the starting point of the search experience and the search journey, and it also encloses what the person expects to find among results pages. So basically, the search intent gives us an idea of the “why” behind a search query – because our audience needs it, because it’s valuable and because someone is looking for it, but also because we have to build that content (in that way).