Search Intent vs. Topical Keywords

[Wazzy88]

After a year away from managing my site I'm aiming to come back with a vengeance.

As I slowly learn more about the trends and recent changes to Google's algo, I'm recognizing more and more that topics are not as successful to generate traffic. Instead many content marketers are focusing on search intent. That is, lower volume keywords that users are searching for and asking daily.

I would love to have a discussion among you all about this interesting trend and what factors you consider when it comes to targeting keywords. For instance,

1. Are you all noticing this trend with your sites?
2. I think as a starter site (less than 10k visitors per month), these lower volume keywords are super important but do they come into play with bigger authority sites?
3. Has this been a change from a certain Google update?

Appreciate all your amazing advice BuSo members!

 

[harrytwatter]

In regards to #1 Google seems to suck at matching intent if you feed them too much. What this is looking like in practice is a pendulum swing away from the 4,000 word mega-guides ("shotgun" approach) and more into 4 X 1,000 word URLs that target what used to be H2s in the 4,000 catch-all piece ("sniper" approach).

Another thing I've become painfully familiar with recently is the difficulty in ranking for very obvious purchase intent keywords. Google isn't even hiding their disdain for affiliate sites anymore with the brutality of these product review updates so any future projects I do will definitely involve a service/digital product I can sell as to not have to compete against the monopoly e-comm players Googs is so overly infatuated with.

Obvious exceptions and naturally a lot "depends" but these are two of the things that I've personally noticed being in deficit in and am keeping top of mind moving forward with any new content/site development.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking here, but I think I get the gist.

More than anything your post needs to match the search intent of the keyword(s) you're optimizing for. All you need to do is search the keyword manually and open up the top 5 or however many you need to understand exactly what they're all doing the same. If it's all top X lists then do a top X list. If it's all how-to guides then do that. If you're trying to write an informational article to go against eCommerce sites then that's not going to work. You need to match the search intent of the keyword as Google understands it or you're not even going to end up on the playing field once indexed.

So while a "parent keyword" that you're targeting has a search intent, it also has a basket of "child keywords" or long-tails & related variants you can target at the same time. You do this by getting a full breadth and depth of topical coverage in the article.

So yes, you not only need to worry about search intent but you also need to worry about optimizing for a topic as well by covering it completely. But that doesn't mean you need to be flying blind or that all the on-page optimization of the past goes out the window. You can rank for a related keyword that you never once mentioned on the page. But you can rank a lot higher for it by mentioning it, and even higher by mentioning it in the right places.

In some senses, nothing has changed, especially after only a year away. If you knew what you were doing a year ago, you know what you're doing today. If you've been gone for a decade then yeah, you've got some learning to do.