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Digital marketing, Online reputation, SEO

What is search intent and how does it influence ranking?

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Search intent is one of the most important factors today when it comes to positioning a website.

With the improvement of artificial intelligence and search engines, the quality of the content displayed on websites is becoming increasingly important. One of the parameters used to measure this quality and rank higher in search engines is precisely the user's search intention.

How is search intent defined?

Simply put, search intent is the goal that a user is trying to find when performing a particular search on the Internet.

Its name is quite transparent in this regard. The difficult thing, then, is not to know what the user's search intent is, but rather to understand how it works.

When someone is using a search engine, such as Google, in order to find information or a product, they have a specific intention. Their intention is, if it is not obvious, to find what they are looking for.

How does Search Intent influence positioning?

The answer is: it influences, and a lot. If you, as a product marketer or blogger, can guess what specific information a user is looking for when they type in a word, you will have found the key.

On many occasions the words that a person types on the Internet do not correspond exactly with what they want to find. Bear in mind that positioning is designed so that the user has quality information, so the more closely it matches what he/she is looking for, the higher a website will rank above the rest.

The artificial intelligences of search engines are in charge of joining threads and getting the information to the user as quickly as possible. Discovering these threads, and knowing the relationship between what you write and what you expect to find, is one of the holy grails of SEO.

The types of search intentions that exist

Being relatively abstract, the study of Search Intent needs to be divided into different categories. There are different types of search intent, which need to be understood in order to know how to reach potential customers more easily:

1. Informational

This is the most common and simplest intention. The user just wants to find a piece of information, to answer a question. In other words: the product they are looking for is usually not bought, but read about directly on the Internet.

Examples of this type of intention would be the following:

  • Apple pie recipe
  • Bus stops on line 6
  • How old is the queen?

2. The types of search intentions that exist

As the name suggests, commercial search intentions are those where the user is interested in a product or service. They may only be looking for comparisons, reviews or information about a product.

Here are some examples to help you understand this type of intention:

  • What is the best non-alcoholic beer?
  • The best desktop computers
  • Comparison of motorbike waistcoats

3. Navigational

They create a personalised homepage or always search for the website they want to visit on Google. That is, instead of entering directly via bookmarks, links, typing in the navigation bar or any other method, the user would type in the search engine examples such as the following:

  •  YouTube
  • Instagram

4. Transactional

Finally, we come to the category that will interest you the most. Transactional search intent is where the user shows interest in buying a product or service.

You can imagine the examples:

  • Buy chessboard
  • How to buy chilli seeds
  • Wagyu beef online price

We hope you found this article useful.

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