Thread by @I___DEREKflint

Misunderstanding keyword intent is the reason most #SEO professionals don't rank their content. Here is a thread on how to fix that [🧵🧵🧵]

It's important to note that there are two forms of intent you’re going to hear about.

1) There is the marketing funnel/customer journey intent of a keyword

and

2) There is topical intent of a keyword (aka what I see most early-stage SEOs get wrong)

Let's start with the first one.

Marketing funnel intent or buyer journey intent is the conceptual understanding of what type of content experience someone is looking for when they type a certain keyword into a search engine.

(And, @SEMrush added these to their keyword tool!)

This type of intent is often broken into 4 categories:

1️⃣ Informational - someone is looking to learn about a topic. This means they’re looking for educational materials, generally something that’s top of funnel.

*Often make good longform blogs or informational service pages.

The keyword “what do goldfish eat” is a good example of an informational keyword.

They might not be at a buyer state but they’re trying to learn something related to your industry.

2️⃣ Navigational - the searcher is looking for something specific, often a location or a company’s webpage they know about and are attempting to find again.

The keyword “goldfish swim school” is a great example of a navigational keyword.

3️⃣ Commercial - this searcher is generally looking to buy something but they’re not ready to buy a specific thing yet.

They’re either searching for a type of product/service to see what’s available on the market or to compare various things against one another.

The keyword “best goldfish tanks” is an example of a commercial keyword.

This person is clearly in the market to buy a tank or aquarium, but they’re not sure which one they want, yet.

4️⃣ Transactional - This person is ready to make a purchase.

They know what they want and they haven’t indicated that they are necessarily doing comparison shopping anymore.

The keywords “goldfish for sale” or “goldfish food” are good examples of transactional keywords.

They know that they need a product and they’ll be buying it in the near future.

How this is applied in the wild:

Say you’re a content marketer and a client says, we do really well with paid ads for the phrase, “goldfish for sale” so we’d like you to help us rank on page 1 for that phrase to help cut down on our ad spend.

You need to be equipped to consult them on the best way to obtain that keyword.

In this case, you could type that keyword into your keyword research tool or into Google’s search bar and see:

1. This keyword only returns e-commerce category pages that contain a bunch of listings for all the types of goldfish they sell.

2. There are no blog posts on this keyword’s SERP so we should not create one with any hope that it will rank on page 1 or that a customer is looking for that type of experience.

Your recommendation to the client would be that they need to create a category page on their e-commerce store’s website for all the productized ways in which someone can purchase a goldfish.

Or...

If they’re not an e-commerce store, then they need to at least create what feels like an e-commerce category page on a service, product, or even their homepage.

That means they need to have a section that links to multiple (the more, the better) types of goldfish that they sell

chuchugoldfish has a good example of a non-ecommerce page giving users the same experience.

The second type of intent:

2) There is topical intent of a keyword (aka what I see most early-stage SEOs get wrong)

The topical intent gets into the question of, “What all do I need to talk about on a page in order to target a keyword?”

The two biggest errors I see when it comes to topical intent matching are:

*Targeting 1 keyword for any content that you create.

*Not covering all of the topics that a user wants to learn about when seeking content using that keyword to search.

A single piece of content often ranks for 10s, 100s, and sometimes 1000s of keywords.

And you won’t know what these keywords should be without a tool and knowing how to do some investigation - which I’ll walk you through below.

By extension, if a piece of content often has many keywords associated with it, it likely means you’ll be covering multiple inquiries within it.

If you were targeting a keyword like “what is a goldfish.” You’ll notice that there is a range of content types that come up on page 1

You have some definition-based, webster-like pages and you have more thorough pages such as Wikipedia and blog posts that contain lists of common questions asked about goldfish.

If you provide a 50-word definition of what a goldfish is, you’ll fail to match the intent needed.

Look at some of the other headers and questions answered on the same pages that rank for “what is a goldfish.”

I'm running out of thread room here.

To learn how to evaluate which keywords share topical intent, I'll walk you through exactly how to identify all the keywords that belong to a single page.

Find that walkthrough for FREE in the below resource:

derekseo.substack.com/p/your-misunde…

And for more in-depth SEO and content marketing threads feel free to give me a follow: @I___DEREKflint

The above newsletter is meant to act as training primer for SEOs - feel free to share it with anyone you think might find it useful.

RT if you found this helpful :)