When Google isn't quite sure what a searcher means just by their search query, the results (appropriately) cater to multiple possible meanings. Those SERPs, if we examine them carefully, are full of useful information. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers some real-world examples of what we can glean just by skimming the kinds of things Google decides are relevant.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how Google is giving us insight through their search results, their suggested searches, and their related searches into the intent that searchers have when they perform their query and how if we're smart enough and we look closely and study well, we can actually get SEO and content opportunities out of this analysis.
So the way I thought I'd run this Whiteboard Friday is a little bit different than usual. Rather than being purely prescriptive, I thought I'd try and illustrate some actual results. I've pared them down a bit and removed the descriptions and taken some out, but to try and show the process of that.
Query 1: Damaged furniture
So here's a query for damaged furniture. If I am trying to reach searchers for this query — let's assume that I'm in the furniture business — I might see here that there are some ads up at the top, like this one from Wayfair, inexpensive furniture up to 70% off. I scroll through the organic results — Everyday Clearance Furniture Outlet, MyBobs.com, okay, that's a local place here in Seattle, Seattle Furniture Repairs and Touchups. Okay, this is interesting. This is a different type of result, or it's serving a different searcher intent. This is, "We will repair your furniture," not, "We will sell you cheap, damaged furniture," which these two are. Then How Stuff Works, which is saying, "We will show you how to repair wooden furniture."
Now I scroll down even further and I get to the related searches — scratch and dent furniture near me, which suggests one of the intents absolutely behind this query is what Wayfair and My Bob's are serving, which is cheap furniture, inexpensive furniture that's been previously damaged in some way. Clearance Furniture Outlet, similar intent, Bob's Discount Furniture Pit, I'm not totally sure about the pit naming convention, and then there are some queries that are similar to these other ones.
So here's what's happening. When you see search results like this, what you should pay close attention to is the intent to position ratio. Let's say...
Intent A: I want to buy furniture
Intent B: I am looking to touch up or repair my furniture
Intent C: Show me how to do it myself
If you see more A's ranking near the top, not in the advertising results, because those don't need a very high click-through rate in order to exist. They can be at 1% or 2% and still do fine here. But if you see these higher up here, that is an indication that a higher percent of Google searchers are preferring or looking for this A intent stuff. You can apply this to any search that you look at.
Thus, if you are doing SEO or creating content to try and target a query, but the content you're creating or the purpose you're trying to serve is in the lower ranked stuff, you might be trapped in a world where you can't rise any higher. Position four, maybe position three is the best you're going to do because Google is always going to be serving the different intent, the intent that more of the searchers for this query are seeking out.
What's also nice about this is if you perform this and you see a single intent being served throughout and a single intent in the related searches, you can guess that it's probably going to be very difficult to change the searcher intent or to serve an entirely different searcher intent with that same query. You might need to look at different ones.
Query 2: E-commerce site design
All right. Next up, e-commerce site design. So an ad up here, again, from Shopify. This one is "Our e-commerce solution just works." They're trying to sell something. I'm going to go with they're trying to sell you e-commerce site design.
Intent A: They are trying to sell you ecommerce design
Intent B: I am looking for successful e-commerce design inspiration/ideas
30 Beautiful and Creative E-commerce Website Designs, this is also from Shopify, because they just took my advice, well, okay, obviously they took my advice long before this Whiteboard Friday. But they're ranking with exactly what we talked about in intent B, which was essentially, "Hey, I am looking for inspiration. I'm looking for ideas. I'm trying to figure out what my e-commerce website should look like or what designs are successful." You can see that again — intent B. So what's ranking higher here? It's not the serve the purchase intent. It's serve the examples intent.
When we get to related searches, you see that again, e-commerce website examples, top e-commerce websites, best e-commerce sites 2016, these are all intent B. If you're trying to serve intent A, you better advertise, because ranking in the top results here is just not going to happen. That's not what searchers are seeking. It's going to be very, very tough.
Slight side note:
Whenever you see this, this late in the year, we're in October right now as we're filming this Whiteboard Friday. I did this search today, and I saw Best E-commerce Sites 2016 still in here. That suggests to me that there were a lot more people searching for it last year than there are this year. You will see there's like the same thing for 2017 down below, but it's lower in the related searches. It doesn't have as much volume. Again, that suggests to me it's on a downward trend. You can double-check that in Google trends, but good to pay attention to. Okay, side note over.
Query 3: Halloween laboratory props
Let's move on to our last example here, Halloween laboratory props. So Halloween is coming up. Lots and lots of people looking for laboratory props and props and costumes and decorations of all kinds. There's a huge business around this, especially in the United States and emerging in the United Kingdom and Australia and other places.
So, up at the top, Google is showing us ads. They are showing us the shopping ads, shop for Halloween laboratory props, and they've got some chemistry sets and a Frankenstein-style light switch that you can buy and some radioactive props and that kind of thing from Target, Etsy, and Oriental Trading Company.
Then they show images, which is not surprising. But hot tip, if you see images ranking in the top of the organic results, you should absolutely be doing image SEO. This is a clear indication that a lot of the searchers want images. That means Google Images is probably getting a significant portion of the search volume. When I see this up here, my guess is always it's going to be 20% plus of searchers are going to the image results rather than the organic search results, and ranking here is often way easier than ranking here.
More interesting things happening next. This result is from Pinterest, "Best 25 Mad Scientist Lab Ideas on Pinterest," "913 Best Laboratory, Frankenstein, Haunt Ideas Images on Pinterest," "DIY Mad Scientist Lab Prop on Pinterest." By the way, there's a video segment in here, which is all YouTube. This happens quite a bit when there is heavy, heavy visual content. You essentially see the domain crowding single-domain domination of search results. What does that mean? Don't do SEO on your site, or fine, do it on your site, but also do it on Pinterest and also do it on YouTube.
If you're creating content like these guys are over here, BigCommerce and Shopify created these great pieces for beautiful ecommerce designs, they've put together a ton of images, wonderful. You can apply that same strategy for this. But then what should you do? Go to Pinterest, upload all those images, create a board, try and get your images shared, do some Pinterest SEO essentially. Do the same thing on YouTube. Have a bunch of examples in a short video that shows all the stuff that you're creating and then upload that to YouTube. Preferably have a channel. Preferably have a few videos so that you can potentially rank multiple times in here, because you know that many people are going here. This is pretty far down. So this is probably less than 10% of searchers make it here, but still a ton of opportunity. Very different type of search intent than what we saw in these previous two.
Look at the related searches — homemade mad scientist lab props, mad scientist props DIY, do it yourself, how to make mad scientist props. These intents are, generally speaking, not being served by any of these results yet. If you scroll far enough in the YouTube videos here, there's actually one video that is a how-to, but most of these are just showing stuff off. That to me is a content opportunity. You could make your Pinterest board potentially using some of these, DIY homemade, how to make, make that your Pinterest board, and probably, I'm going to guess that you will have a very good chance of pushing these other Pinterest results out of here and dominating those.
So a few takeaways, just some short ones before we end here.
- In the SEO world, don't target content without first understanding the searcher. We can be very misled by just looking at keywords. If we look at the search results first, we can get inside the searcher's head a little bit. Hopefully, we can have some real conversations with those folks too.
- Second, Google SERPs, search suggest, related searches, they can all help with problem number one.
- Three, gaps in serving intent can yield ranking opportunity, like we showed in a few of these examples.
- Finally, don't be afraid to disrupt your own business or your own content or your own selfish interest in order to serve searchers. In the long term, it will be better for you.
You can see that exemplified here by Shopify saying, "We're going to show off a bunch of beautiful ecommerce designs even though some of them are not from Shopify." BigCommerce did the same thing. Even though some of them are not using BigCommerce's platform, they basically are willing to sacrifice some of that in order to serve searchers and build their brand, because they know if they don't, somebody else clearly will.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I would love to hear your examples in the comments about how you've done search intent interpretation through looking at search results. We'll see you again next week. Take care.
Sturdy Whiteboard Friday Rand! Trying to utilize Pinterest, YouTube, etc. when targeting searches that already have those results in the SERP is brilliant. Excited to try these out. For local businesses, I would also add that if you see a directory of "top list" site ranking high for a search you are wanting to rank for (such as Yelp, Thumbtack, etc.), make it a priority to get a completely filled out and optimized profile on those directories to help as well.
Yes this is huge for local businesses. I've found that ranking for "product Location" or is very different intent to "product" When people type "product location" they want to buy and when they just type "product" they want to learn. So we optimise accordingly. Google is creating so much extra work! It's no longer enough to be number one. You need to be number one, in the ads, in the images, in the shopping and everywhere to get a decent amount of customers locally. Great talk Rand, as always. You seem extra excited in this one!
Yes, also to keep in mind, that sometimes it's good to develop PDFs and Doc files that people could look for. I've seen quite a few queries where volume was high and the results had a couple of PDFs & Docs. As you said, SEO doesn't have to be about getting people to visit your page per se, it could be any asset you create and I've seen success matching intent with direct files.
I feel the same way! I actually experienced that sometimes creating your content using a PDF really is beneficial.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for another great WBF.
I use a slightly different technique. I start with the core short tail keyword for my topic.
Then I see where the related, predictive/suggested , and "people also ask" results point.
This removes the individual website variables from the decision criteria.
I categorise these by intent and look at the placement and frequency.
The results are generally pretty obvious.
However, I love your tip relating to the images. Definitely another variable to throw into the equation.
Thanks Rand to help us to keep the focus in the user satisfaction. It's amazing how much info Google is giving us about the search intents just taking a look of the result of a query!!
Excelentes consejos para decidir qué tipos de contenido desarrollar. ;)
Thanks
Hi Rand - Great post! - Thanks particularly for the insight into image seo and how to rank in Google search. Seems I need to be looking outside of website seo to rank for visual content. It would be great to have more on this subject in the future.
An update - very happy I just found a previous Whiteboard Friday post from back in May on image seo! - watching it now :)
Thanks Rand, this provides some great vocabulary around search intent. And it will be really helpful for our clients who sometimes get obsessed about keywords that they *think* people use to search for them, when we can tell that those keywords aren't the ones which will deliver them the results they want!
Great WBF Rand.
We are experiencing something very exciting, a living example of this WBF.
We are working to target a keyword "حراجمعه" and we have built a bunch of quality links and other SEO best practices and it has worked. We currently rank #1.
But when you search "حراجمعه 95" which is our target keyword + a year ( Jalali years ), you will see totally different results for the "حراجمعه" in the past year ( We are currently in year 96 in Jalali Calendar ).
The #1 result for "حراجمعه" is our landing page which contains products for Black friday and the #1 result for "حراجمعه 95" is a blog post which describes how last year's "حراجمعه" was held and some statistics.
Thanks again.
i am working on a job posting website. for my site i have targeted some keyword and creating link but not ranking yet. what i have to do actually?
Very interesting topic! And thank you for the practical tips! I'm glad you did this WBF about searcher intent. I knew this was important, but I was still struggling about how to find out about searcher intent of a search query. This helps a lot!
I really love this topic, Rand - and picked up a few good nuggets from this WBF.
It would be great if there was some sort of "search intent" metric(s) in tools like Keyword Explorer. I find myself running a LOT of manually searches to help understand intent and can't help but think there might be a way for software to help.
Off the top of my head, a small sliding scale for "Informational vs. Commercial" intent (based on the SERP for each keyword) would be a great start. Perhaps it could use CPC metrics to help determine it.
Great WBF, as always... would love to see more on this topic in the future!
FYI - best ecommerce sites 2017 doesn't appear to be trending down compared to best ecommerce sites 2016. Trend lines appear pretty even based on time of year, so it may just be displaying based on overall average search volume which hasn't caught up since it's a relatively low volume term (50-170 searches a month according to keyword planner).
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015...
Thanks for searching it for us! I was also curious!
Hi Rand
Exact. Google, or rather the user in Google is already telling you what they want to see. If in the Keyword there is the word Halloween, and the first results belong to images in pinterest, do not waste your time looking for new formulas and give hard to this social network. And so with all the examples.
Have a good weekend
This is gold Rand!
I notice that I've been making the E-commerce example mistake. But doing great with Youtube example without knowing about it haha
My question then is: If the keyword search is "Ecommerce site design" and I have a page for that keyword that is a transactional page. But the intent of the search is "best ecommerce designs" not "buying ecommerce website"...
Should I create a new page informational about "best ecommerce designs" and only going with this page for the keyword "Ecommerce site design"?
Or should I try to position both pages for that keyword - The transactional one and the informational one?
Thank you very much
M
Hi Rand. Very inspirational video. Thanks. Never looked at the searcher's intent so deeply and in such a structured way. Will definitely try to use your hints in the future.
One additional thought: search intent and how Google treats it is something DYNAMIC it might change over time. So you are never really done with it. One should check that regularly.
I often see that with local results (local pack). For the same search query Google used to add a local pack (experiment?) for a given search query for a while. Months/years later they consistently wouldn't do that anymore. Same goes with pictures or not in the SERP's.
The Halloween SERP's might considerably look different when Halloween season is over.
Very interesting article, it has served me a lot, but I do not finish to understand well the importance of keywords, I read in other articles that keywords are not as important as a few years ago.
It is true?
Surprising analysis tool: powerful, simple and at no cost (apart from our effort). After all, it has always been there for all to see. I published the integral translation of this Whiteboard Friday on ideawebitalia it
I love these weekly nuggets of info that can be put to use immediately. I am continually enlightened on how to digest what I see from Google and how to make the intel work for my niche market. Keep it up Rand.
Another great insight in using Google to 'show you what they want/like' and then adapting a marketing strategy using the data!
If you are do a search on Google, and the search engine isn’t quite sure what you mean by your query, the results will do its best to cater to multiple possible meanings. Those SERPs, if you look at them carefully, are full of useful information. In this article of Whiteboard Friday, rand show us some real-world examples of what we can glean just by looking around at the things Google decides is relevant. So thank you about that wizard
Awesome article!
I just steped into Seo and this will really help me a lot.
very good post and very good ideas Rand !!
It is not one of my favorite ways of searching for keywords, the Google search engine but I always use it as an orientation since I think that if Google puts those options ... it will be something! so to use those that best suit me of all that it offers me.
This is definitely something I find super helpful when performing keyword research! The only problem - my agency works with several medical associations for professionals, and while there is tons of volume around specific conditions, you can tell by the results that it's patient-focused information rather than for professionals. In the few and far between instances where I find search terms that have more of a professional searcher intent, the volume is usually very low. Is it fair to say then that organic search is never going to be a big traffic driver and quality is more important than quantity? Should they continue to optimize for the higher volume terms but be resigned to lower rankings? Thanks for another great WBF!
great WBF Rand, thanks! one thing: you said "advertise if you want to sell ecommerce design".. but i think you can also do SEO on different keywords then, like "ecommerce templates xyz" ..
Out of Box WBF!
Absolutely, I will be using these tactics to see positional improvement for my client website!
Just need to know, can we even consider "Auto Search" for our next content idea?
The whiteboard image is not clickable :( What am I to do!? LOL ok but seriously, I'd love to save the image if possible. Thank you!
The examples were fun to read. I've been noticing and teaching about this for some time now. The funny thing here is that if we search for something that people usually don't search for, the serps would be quite confusing with a few unrelated results. This clearly shows us that google puts a lot of emphasis on user's behavior and when there isn't enough information coming from them, it's kind of lost.
Hey Rand,
Very insightful WBF. I have a couple of questions:
1) How important is scalability of this tactic?
My initial thought was, "How am I going to be able to do this for all of the target keywords for all of my clients?" Then I realized that it may be more important to utilize something that resembles these steps for future targeting, or if you are going back to work on previously created content. So, do you think this is important to scale?
2) For the dated ecommerce example, is it more likely that there were a higher volume of searches happening in previous years, OR that there wasn't an appropriate result to show that had been created in 2017? It could be a trend, or it could be a lack of valuable results.
Thanks!
hi dear. very well post thanks you gave us idea to focus on visitor satisfactions.This great idea who to search google intents just talking.
usainsuranceguidelines.blogspot.co
You done it again! GREAT White Board Friday. SEO can be overwhelming sometimes, but every Friday I get OMG feeling of how facinating the world of search results is!
Thanks Rand. Hope You don't mind if I write about your post in my blog :)
Have been watching WBF for the last 3 years. This is one of the best. Learnt few new things today.
Some great content targeting ideas here Rand, I do try and look into query intent on what questions people search with, but haven't really delved into what can be scraped from the results. I will be taking a bit of time to research into your concept and see what I can get out of it. Thanks for another great WBF!
Hi Rand, great topic and great explanations. As Google becomes more human-like in interpreting search intent, we have to change our approach as well in creating pages or copy. At the end of the day our job should be to serve searchers in the first place.
Hey Rand, great insights. I remember seeing Wil Reynolds do a demo of something similar here and using the AdWords results to get a sense of what title tag and meta description elements appear to have the biggest effect on CTR. I know it's not the same as using searcher intent for actual content creation, but what are your thoughts about the value of PPC results in that context?
Rand et al,
As always, thank you for putting this together. It is elucidating.
2 questions
1) what did you use to perform your search query? (A 3rd party platform, Google itself straight from your [chrome?] browse [in incognito mode no doubt]???)
2) this question is directly related to the first... Wouldn't the same search query yield varying results based on the previous search history/location/time of search/etc of every single unique searcher? Doesn't Google's search result also take my own search history and patterning over the previous days/weeks/months and their own algorithms to try to serve me what they assume I am most likely looking for as compared to my neighbor down the road who is 20 years younger and has a very different intent driven search pattern? How reliable are these search results as actual trend indicators?
Very informative article. It appears that Google is already implementing AI in to its algorithms. I think it is the way that search engines are taking these days. It is also important to interpret "series of queries" run on the SE by a user in interpreting the intent.
This is awesome insights..I mean Google already telling us what type content one need to serve for particular query. And how we can also explore the content opportunities after looking at SERP.
Very good post I'm starting to do SEO seriously in my blog, and the other day, a friend committed me to make a YouTube channel of our theme, to relaunch the blog. He also talked to me about making a channel of podscats, since it is something that is not very worked.
I wanted to ask if this is a good idea, since I understand that podscat is only sound, there are no images.
And if so, it would be good to raise the authority of my website. Regards, and thank you very much!1.
Hi Rand, Love the WBF. We do a comparable analysis when talking to clients. One element clients love when we raise it - is that google has spent Billions fine tuning their algorithm to try and deliver to the searchers intent. Why not use those billions to fine tune market strategy... Good marketers can take more from a page that seo operatives. By extrapolating and considering a SERP as a factor it is in my view good marketing as well. The auto suggestions etc. everything. Obviously some pages are unhelpful but the insights are always beneficial. Thanks again for more insights.
Identifying searchers intent also helps you form a more relevant sales funnel. I find that the more personal that becomes (after intent is revealed) the more pleasant the user experience.