What’s up everybody. Welcome to the final lesson of Module 4. In the last two lessons you learned about two important UX ranking signals, CTR and Dwell Time. You also learned how you can optimize your content for CTR and dwell time so that Google searchers click on your result and stay on it. These user experience signals are important today.
And are becoming more important with every Google update. And in this lesson we’re going to build on what we’ve covered so far. Specifically, I’m going to show you exactly how to optimize your content for search intent. You’ve probably heard about search intent before. It’s basically the underlying reason that someone searches for something.
And, as it turns out, search intent is super important for SEO right now. Why? Well, search intent is basically Google’s “uber ranking factor”. If you think about it, Google’s main goal is to give a Google searcher what they want. And the better a piece of content satisfies users, the higher Google will rank it. In fact, Google has recently stated that they’re putting a lot of weight on search intent right now.
As you learned in lessons 1 and 2 from this module, Google uses UX signals to figure out whether or not users are satisfied with a specific result. And yes, you can and should optimize your content specifically for CTR, Bounce Rate and Dwell Time.
But at the end of the day, if your content isn’t a good fit for what that searcher wants, your UX signals are going to be bad. No matter what else you do. For example, a while back I published this post on the Backlinko blog. At first, this post was a mega hit. It brought in a ton of visitors, traffic, social shares, and backlinks. But over time, that page’s rankings started to drop.
Like really really drop. It went from the middle of the first page to the middle of the second page. At first, I was confused. On the surface, this piece of content did everything right. It was a piece of in-depth, high-quality content. It had a decent number of authority backlinks. I optimized it for on-page SEO. And I made sure that the page was ALSO optimized to maximize UX signals, like dwell time and CTR.
That’s when I realized: this page did everything right except for one key thing. It didn’t match search intent for people that searched for my target keyword. People searching for my target keyword didn’t want a case study. Or a long back story. They wanted something more step-by-step. So I tore down and rebuilt the page from scratch.
This time, I made sure that my page was a great fit for search intent. Which ultimately boosted organic traffic to that page by over 650%. And got me into the top 3 in Google for my main keyword. As I later learned, this wasn’t random. In fact, I’ve implemented this exact process on lots of other struggling pages. And I’ve seen similar results for other content that I’ve re-optimized to better match search intent. I’ll share those examples later in this lesson.
But the bottom line here is this. Satisfying search intent basically automatically helps with key UX Signals, like bounce rate and dwell time. It’s obviously better if you do this one day one. But as I just showed you, you can also and go back to tweak your existing content so that it’s a one to one match for search intent. Either way, you’ll learn exactly how to optimize for search intent in this lesson.
So without further ado, let’s get into the steps. Your first step is to figure out what someone searching for your keyword actually wants. Now, if you’ve read about search intent before, you may have seen people break down search intent into categories. Informational, Navigational, Commercial and Transactional. In fact, I’ve talked about these categories before on the Backlinko blog.
The thing is, these categories are technically correct. But they’re way too basic. And they’re not advanced enough to get the type of results I just shared with you. As an SEO That Works student, you can do better. Specifically, in this step I’m going to show you how to dig one layer deeper below these surface-level categories. For example, let’s take a look at this piece of content again. According to the 4 categories theory of search intent, what do you think my keyword would fall under?
Informational, right? Right. Well, my first version of that page had a ton of information. But it didn’t rank. Why? Because my page didn’t have the right type of information that someone searching for that keyword wanted. So yeah, figuring out the search intent category that your keyword falls under is a good start. But it’s usually not enough. How about another example?
Let’s say that you run an ecommerce site. And one of your most important keywords is: “yellow tennis shoes”. Well, the search intent for that term is obviously commercial. And you have a product page that sells yellow tennis shoes. So in theory, you’re good to go. But in reality, you need to figure out exactly what someone searching for “yellow tennis shoes” wants to see on an ecommerce product page. Do they want interactive product images? Free shipping and returns? A model specifically for clay courts? These are the questions that you want to answer in this step.
Now you might be wondering how can you figure out what someone searching for a given keyword actually wants? Fortunately, you don’t need to guess. Google usually tells you exactly what you need to know here. All you need to do is search for your keyword. And check out the results that already rank in the top 10. These results will tell you everything you need to know about search intent.
For example, a while ago this page from Backlinko was struggling to rank. And one day I decided to analyze the top 10 results in Google for my target keyword. Sure enough, I realized why. My page really focused on a single SEO strategy. An effective one. But still one that was pretty specific. But when I looked at the top 10 results, they all tended to cover a high-level SEO approach.
So it was clear that I had a search intent mismatch with my page. Which probably explained why that page struggled to rank. Next, it’s time to align your page’s content with the search intent that you just found. What you do here depends a lot on what you found in step one.
In some cases, you need to add more content to a page. In other cases, you might have to trim things down a little bit. Sometimes, you might only need to make a few tweaks to your content. And other times you’ll need to make major changes. Again, this all really depends on the search intent for that keyword. And the content that you wrote.
Ideally, you’d do this when you publish your content in the first place. But it’s perfectly fine to do this as a later step. So, back to the example I was just talking about. My page was simply not a great fit for that keyword’s search intent. So I completely overhauled that page to better fit this search intent. A few weeks later, I found myself finally on page 1 for my target keyword. Same backlinks. Same on-page SEO. And a good chunk of the content was exactly the same.
That’s the power of optimizing for search intent. How about another example? This was another page from Backlino that just wouldn’t rank no matter what I did. And when I analyzed the first page, I realized that my content was probably too advanced for people searching for that keyword. Plus, the format itself probably wasn’t a good fit for what searchers wanted.
So I sort of rewrote the post to better match search intent. Which quickly got me to the top of page one. To be clear: I didn’t rewrite the post from scratch. In fact, I incorporated some of the content and ideas from the old page into this one. That way, this step didn’t take a ton of time. Our last step is to scale this process. And turn it into a repeatable system.
Here are three strategies for doing just that. The first is to use what’s known as a “Revive tool”. I’ll have a link to my favorite revive tool in the worksheet. But they all work pretty much the same way, they scan your Google Analytics for pages that have seen a significant traffic drop. And a lot of the time, you’ll find that a page stopped getting Google traffic because it wasn’t a one to one fit for search intent. But instead of having to scroll through page after page in Analytics, the tool does the heavy lifting for you. And it spits out a list of pages to take a look at.
Second, you can do annual reviews and updates of your older content. This is something that we do at least once a year at Backinko. And it makes a huge difference in our organic traffic. Especially for keywords where “up to date content” is a big part of search intent. For example, we review most of our important pages to make sure that there aren’t any broken links. Mentions of tools that aren’t around anymore. Or outdated screenshots.
I doubt that Google directly measures any of this stuff. But I’m confident that keeping our content up to date helps it better match search intent for certain keywords. Note that I say “for certain keywords”. I don’t think you usually need to keep every page on your site up to date. For a page like this, yes, being up to date is super important. On the other hand, this trademark technique case study is basically the same as it was when I first published it many years ago.
People searching for this keyword don’t care as much if the content is updated for this year. So I just sort of leave it as it is. The last strategy I have for scaling and systemizing this process is to republish updated content. In other words, update an old piece of content. Optimize it for search intent. And republish it like a brand new post. Why is this helpful?
First of all, it makes it so Google quickly finds and indexes your new content. Second, it gives your content a second opportunity to get links, shares, traffic and all that good stuff. For example, I republished this page after I created the new version that was better aligned with search intent. That helped Google find and index the page super quickly. And led to a number of new backlinks that pushed it to the first page. And because my page was a GREAT search intent fit, my page steadily climbed the rankings over the next few weeks.
With that, this process is complete. To sum up the big takeaway from this lesson, search intent is important because it helps boost UX signals automatically. And in this video I showed you exactly how to figure out search intent for a specific keyword. And how to align your content so it fits that search intent like a glove. That actually wraps up Module 4. Looking ahead to Module 5, that’s where you’ll learn how to scale up the entire SEO That Works System.
Specifically, in this module I’ll show you how to scale content, scale link building and more. But for now, go ahead and grab the worksheet for this lesson. The worksheet recaps the process that I outlined in this lesson. And I’ll see you in Module 5.
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