Why Searcher Intent Should Direct Your Website Content

As content marketing moves into the mainstream of marketing strategies, you’ll find no shortage of articles being written that tells us how to create content that our customers want. In the world of SEO, you’ll hear a lot about topical optimization and how to create content that stays focused on a single topic in order to be “authoritative.”

But those aren’t the only important things to consider when it comes to creating customer-focused content. Having a thoroughly researched topic does make for great content, but when it comes to search and keyword optimization, you need to go one step beyond that. You need your content to match the intent of the searcher.

Keywords and Searcher Intent

Keyword research plays no small role in this. And if you do your research right, you’ll find that a single topic will produce keywords of all different intents. Some searchers are looking for information, some are seeking out specific products, and some are just beginning to see what’s out there and make comparisons. And surprisingly, some of the keywords that come up when researching a particular topic show searchers are looking for something completely different altogether.

Let’s look at a keyword research for “acrylic nails.” On that topic you can write two distinct pieces of content. One for searchers looking to buy acrylic nails, and one for searchers looking for information about them. On the former, you can optimize a website category or product page touting the benefits of the acrylic nails that you sell on your site. For the latter you can create a great piece of content covering just abut everything anyone wants to know about acrylic nails. You can use this to drive visitors to your blog or acrylic nails product pages.

Giving Searchers Less Is Giving Them More

But even here we see two types of content supporting two different intents; the trick is knowing what searchers want. You can do this by looking more closely at the keywords. Here is where you’ll see a much wider variety of searcher intent. Some searchers may be looking for acrylic nail designs, glitter for acrylic nails, and other related acrylic nail supplies such as polish, brushes, art, primer and kits.

As you can see, to write one authoritative acrylic nail post covering all these topics may not be the best idea. In fact, it might make more sense to create multiple pieces of content, each of them discussing the topics more thoroughly.

Sometimes, writing about a topic means diving deeper into the intent of the searcher, and deciding whether your audience is best served by producing several pieces of content, or one piece of content that covers the topic more in-depth. Either way, always remember to focus on what searchers are truly looking to find on the pages of your website.