Podcast

Main talking points include:

There's an inherent cost to ranking in the search engines... You either pay a direct advertising cost through Ad Spend, or you pay through the time and effort to rank organically. By employing an SEO professional you also incur the cost to rank organically, just faster than you would on your own.

Understanding how Google makes money can really help you to fast-track your organic SEO objectives...

Google makes money by running ads. It can charge a premium for those ads by ensuring the 10 organic results displayed on page 1 are the best, most relevant pages on the internet that will help the user – otherwise, why would anyone bother to pay to be above them?

Understanding the terms and, crucially, the intent behind the terms, that people are paying for means that you can be way more focussed on your keyword research and content creation process.

"But Google doesn't use keywords anymore?" I hear you cry. Well, not exactly.

Google has moved to show results far more based on users' intent than purely on a keyword basis, but you can't get away from the fact that it all starts with what a user types (or says) into the search bar.

Types of user intent:

• Commercial intent
  • This intent signifies a drive by the user to act. Searchers are most likely to commit to purchasing or enquiring as a result of these types of searches
• Informational intent
  • The user is willing to find out more about the subject matter. It’s probably not a good idea to try selling anything to them outright, but these could be good for developing “gated” content and capturing email addresses
• Transactional intent
  • Transactional intent lies somewhere between commercial and informational intent. Essentially, these queries can represent both the purpose to buy or read more about the subject
• Navigational intent
  • These people are just trying to get around the internet with the least path of resistance. They know where they want to be and just don't want to type it into a search bar

You can get all of this information through keyword research tools, along with the values people are paying to appear on page 1.

So what do you do with this information when you have it?

1. You can make decisions on which keywords to attempt to rank for and which not to bother with.
2. You can create versions of content for different types of intent, especially once you understand your client's sales funnel
3. You can laser focus on what will move the bottom line for your client the fastest and show an ROI – from an agency perspective we also have to win clients, demonstrate results and value and win the trust of our clients too... an added pressure that making good decisions quickly can help you with.