All online journeys go through a variety of stages, starting with a complete lack of awareness about a topic all the way through to direct purchase intent, purchase and post-purchase loyalty (or lack thereof!).
At each stage of the user journey, we need to understand our target audience’s objectives and motivations and work out the content and interactions that would drive them toward making a purchase.
You can’t rely on impulsive buying to sell your products because making a purchase decision is often scary because it comes with a lot of responsibility. To most, it takes a long time to earn money and takes a moment to blow it away on the wrong things.
Hence it is your job to facilitate that decision and convert your users by giving them confidence, clarity and certainty. This is the key to good SEO, Sales and User Experience.
So let’s discuss different search intents.
Types of Search Intent
Informational Intent
Let’s start with informational intent. Lots of searches on the internet are done by people looking for information. This could be information about the weather, information about educating children, information about SEO, you name it. People with an informational intent have a specific question or want to know more about a certain topic.
Comparison Intent
This can be considered as the subcategory of informational intent but it comes later in the user journey. Let’s say the user first searched for “best smartphones in 2022” and they found a couple of models they might like so now they might search something like “Galaxy S22 Ultra v/s iPhone13 Pro”. People searching for such comparisons are usually very close to making a purchase decision.
Transactional or Purchase Intent
The third type of search intent is transactional intent. Lots of people buy stuff online and browse the web to find the best purchase. People are searching with transactional intent when their purpose is to buy something at that moment. Often that means that they already know exactly what they want to buy and just want to get to that product page right away.
Wishlist Intent
Some people have the intention to buy in the (near) future and use the web to do their research. What washing machine would be best? Which SEO plugin is the most helpful? These people also have transactional intent but need some more time and convincing. These types of search intents are usually called wishlists or investigating intents.
Navigational Intent
People with this intent want to visit a specific website. For example, people who search for [Facebook] online are usually on their way to the Facebook website. So you want to make sure that your website can be found when someone searches for your company’s name online.
How to use this information:
Next time when you are writing a copy or performing on page SEO instead of just stuffing keywords or following some random on page optimization ask yourself:
• What is the user trying to achieve through this search query?
• At what stage of user journey the query arises?
• How do we carrying the user from this stage to next stage in a way best suited to achieve our goals? (Be it to encourage to subscribe to an email list or purchase a copy of your book etc.)
• How do we create a win-win situation so both of our objectives can be achieved?
Thinking about the copy in this way will help you optimise for the users, not just for the search engines. And this is important because bots don’t buy products, humans do!
Thanks for reading! Let me know your views on this topic in the comments below, and like and share. Sharing is Caring 😉
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