Keyword Research Pt 1: How to Analyze Searcher Intent – 1.2. SEO Course by Ahrefs
Hey, it's Sam Oh, and welcome to the
second lesson which is on search intent. And I touched on this in the first lesson
on SEO basics, but I really want to take some time to unpack what it is and
how to use it in keyword research. Reason being, if you can't match searcher
intent, then you probably aren't going to rank for your target keywords. So again, search intent represents
the reason behind a searcher's query. And matching search intent is one of those
must-do things to show search engines that your page will fulfill their goal to deliver
the most relevant results for any given query. And while it might sound like you're trying
to satisfy Google, what you're actually doing is learning what you need to do
to satisfy the searcher's intent. Identifying search intent is
usually quite easy.
All you have to do is search for the
keyword you want to rank for and then analyze the top-ranking results. And the top-ranking results are a great proxy
to understand search intent because Google understands what searchers want,
probably more than anyone else. Now, "analyzing" is kind of a jargony word,
but I have a simple 3-prong formula you can use. It's called the three C's of search intent. The first C is content type. Content type can usually be categorized into
blog posts, videos, product, category, and landing pages. For example, the dominant type of pages for
the query "best golf shoes" are blog posts. The second C is content format. And this applies more to blog posts
and landing pages. A few common blog formats you'll see are
how-tos, step-by-step tutorials, list posts, and opinion editorials. For a landing page, that might be
something like a tool or calculator. Again for the query "best golf shoes" you'll
see that all of the top results are listicles, which makes sense because the word "best"
implies that a comparison needs to be made.
And the third C is content angle,
which often depicts the "benefit." It's basically your hook as to why someone
should click and visit your page. For "best golf shoes," you'll see that every
post has gone with the "freshness angle," which is evident based on the current
year being in the titles. In my opinion, this is the least important
and often least consistent among top-ranking pages. Now, this is just one example of
search intent for a keyword.
Let's go through a few more examples
to really drill in this concept. The first example is for the query
"how to swing a golf club." The dominant content type is
clearly blog posts. But you'll also notice that a YouTube video
is ranking ahead of the blog posts. So this tells us that it may be worth creating
both a blog post and video to potentially get two different spots in the search results. As for content format, they're
clearly all how-tos. And seeing as the nature of the topic would
require a step-by-step procedure, that's probably the route you'd want to go too. And you can confirm this by actually
visiting some of the top-ranking pages.
Now, with content angle, it appears as
though "for beginners" or "basic" seems to be the right way to approach the topic . The second example is for
the query "golf clubs." Looking at the SERP, you'll see that
they're all ecommerce category pages. Which tells us that when people search for
this query, they're likely in shopping mode. Now, seeing as content format applies mostly
to blog posts and landing pages, it wouldn't be applicable here since we're looking
at ecommerce category pages. As for content angle, it seems to be mostly
about deals — so saving money on golf clubs. Alright, the final example is for
something like "golf bags." Looking at the SERP, you'll see
something a bit different. We have a mixed SERP.
Content type for the top-ranking page
is an ecommerce category page. Then we have a couple of blog posts
on the best golf bags. And we also have an outlier on
how to buy golf bags. And towards the bottom half of the results,
we have more ecommerce category pages. So what do you do? Well, in order to make an educated decision,
we still need to lay some foundation work.
So we'll revisit this example in a later lesson. For now, you should have the basics of search
intent down, and tomorrow we'll be publishing the next video which is on the first step
of the keyword research process: keyword generation. So make sure to subscribe so
you don't miss that. And if you're watching this video at a later date,
then check the description because we'll have a link to the entire course there. See you in the next lesson.
