If you knew what you wanted, you probably wouldn’t be using a search engine. Paradoxically, search engines such as Bing and Yahoo are trying to figure out what you want when you type in a phrase that could be incredibly vague. The search engine wants to maintain its reputation by delivering the most relevant results possible, so it is going to use a variety of tools to turn your query into an answer that you are going to like.
Intent Based Search Matching is the search engine’s solution. First, an engine looks to see if you want to find a specific website, learn more about a topic, or buy something. It uses rules based on past user experiences, click patterns, and information that you may be providing without your own knowledge. For example, if you are looking for travel-related terms, your subsequent search engine queries for cities may include information on flights and hotels. Also known as “personalized” results, your response from the search engine is going to differ significantly from what a “first time” user is going to get when he/she types in the exact same query.
If you are trying to get your site to rank for certain phrases, intent based search can be a friend and an enemy. As a friend, it is going to present results in certain situations when your website would not otherwise rank, thanks to the individual user’s previous queries. As an enemy, your top keyword rankings may get buried on personalized searches because the engine thinks that there are better matches based on user data. Therefore, it is a lot harder to estimate the traffic you can get based on search demand.
How can you react to such a dynamic delivery of search results? For starters, you can put more content on your site, and make sure that you are a leader in your industry for information. You can explore common synonyms for your main keywords and go into depth on topics. If you’re a vacation site, you can delve deeper into a destination’s attractions, right down to a detailed synopsis of each individual tour or feature. Aside from increasing your potential long-tail traffic, your keywords are working to create a semantic presence in the search engines that makes you a better result for all kinds of search intent.
Conversely, you can structure your site to a specific intent. Normally it does not pay to attempt to show up in results when people are looking for a specific website. If you think that a sizable portion of people looking for information may also be buyers, then you can make your site appear to be an informational resource. For a pure sales site, you can create relevance with original content on pages for products people are likely to buy. You can also make sure that your ecommerce pages are in line with common standards for getting discovered by search engines, so you have a fighting chance against massive sites that put manufacturer-written content on their product pages.
As always, keyword research and an understanding of your market can go a long way to driving search engine success. If you can match up your site with the same type of phrases used by someone with an “intention” to buy, you are helping the search engines find the best possible result. Most standard SEO techniques like keyword research, content creation, and link building already are working to match high-converting, high traffic queries with web pages, so you may have set yourself up for “intent based search” without knowing it. However, it always pays to understand what the search engines are trying to do, so if you can match up your pages with a user’s intent, then you have a better chance of making good sales instead of just getting traffic.
Tags: intent based search
