{"id":81,"date":"2021-12-23T10:43:05","date_gmt":"2021-12-23T10:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thinktraffic.co.uk\/?p=81"},"modified":"2021-12-23T10:48:48","modified_gmt":"2021-12-23T10:48:48","slug":"content-marketing-user-intent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinktraffic.co.uk\/content-marketing-user-intent\/","title":{"rendered":"Content Marketing, User Intent & How to Rank Higher in Google"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine this: You have had lots of buzz around content marketing and you have been told that it\u2019s the best thing since sliced bread. So you start creating lots of content, and publishing as much as you can.<\/p>\n

But after several weeks, or months you aren\u2019t getting the results you had hoped for. Either you are getting no traffic at all, or maybe you\u2019re just not seeing the Google rankings you had hoped for.<\/p>\n

Your problem could be in failing to understand user intent. And if you\u2019re not sure what that means, read on!<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Understand The Purpose Of Your Content<\/h2>\n

Before you worry too much about whether your content is going to rank, you need to consider what the purpose of your content is. Different types of content perform better on different platforms (and for\u00a0different types of users).<\/p>\n

For example: This post is the sort that will probably do better on social media. This is because it talks about a topic that is relatively unlikely to be Googled. The aim of this post is to be shared and attract links.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean that I won\u2019t get any search engine traffic, but if my main goal was to get traffic from a search engine, I would have written a different post with a more focused and in demand topic.<\/p>\n

\n

For example, based on the title of this post you could imagine that I might hope to rank for \u201ccontent marketing\u201d or perhaps \u201chow to rank higher in Google\u201d. The reality though is that a user who searches for \u201chow to rank higher in Google\u201d probably wants a more basic and comprehensive tutorial style post about SEO.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It is important to vary your content, so that some times you are writing a post that can effectively target keywords for SEO\u2019s sake and other times you are writing content for other audiences (diversifying your traffic sources).<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

When Writing For Search Engine Traffic<\/h2>\n

Just to be clear, I\u2019m not talking about writing \u201cSEO content\u201d (that\u2019s just one of many\u00a0easy ways to ruin your user experience), you should always be writing your content for your readers. What I am talking about is more like selecting a topic appropriately.<\/p>\n

If you want your content to rank, it is generally a good idea to start with some keywords in mind, so let\u2019s run through an example:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say you have a selection of keywords you would like to rank for:<\/p>\n

seo for small businesses (4sales,6posts)
\nsmall business seo (6sales,4posts)
\nsmall business search engine marketing (1news,1guide,1article,4sales,3posts)<\/p>\n

These are intuitively pretty similar searches, so you might be forgiven for just choosing your preferred wording. Or worse yet, just targeting the phrase with the best search volume. But it\u2019s also important to consider how different wording can imply a different user intent.<\/p>\n

\n

The simplest way to guage user intent is to \u201cGoogle It\u201d, there are 2 reasons for this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Google have lots of user data that they can use to judge user intent and serve results accordingly.<\/li>\n
  • If you want to rank, your content has to be inline with what Google wants to show for that query.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n

    The way to do this is simple. Start by Googling each phrase (use incognito to avoid personalisation bias) and opening up the first 10 organic results. In other words, see what is ranking already for that phrase.<\/p>\n

    Do your best to categorise the results and group them. You can even make a chart to visualise the data. For these three phrases for example here are the results that I got:<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    As you can see, I sorted them into groups of, blog post type pages, news articles and sales pages (typically pages of SEO agencies). What you can clearly see is that Google thinks that:<\/p>\n

    \n
      \n
    • \u201csmall business SEO\u201d is more likely to imply the intent of looking for an SEO agency<\/li>\n
    • \u201cseo for small businesses\u201d is more likely to imply the user is looking for advice\/content<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n

      What is interesting is that \u201csmall business search marketing\u201d seems to be mostly served by news type results (similar to blog posts, but from more mainstream news sites such as the Huffington Post). But overall the intent is clearly leaning towards content vs sales.<\/p>\n

      So the question is, if you wanted to target this type of niche with your content marketing, which phrases would you focus on? Whereas if you were optimising your agency\u2019s home page, which phrase would you target then?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Imagine this: You have had lots of buzz around content marketing and you have been told that it\u2019s the best thing since sliced bread. So you start creating lots of content, and publishing as much as you can. But after several weeks, or months you aren\u2019t getting the results you had hoped for. Either you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":83,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nContent Marketing, User Intent & How to Rank Higher in Google - Think Traffic<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thinktraffic.co.uk\/content-marketing-user-intent\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Content Marketing, User Intent & How to Rank Higher in Google - Think Traffic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Imagine this: You have had lots of buzz around content marketing and you have been told that it\u2019s the best thing since sliced bread. 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