Getting started with search intent
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A short on-ramp to search intent for teams who have not touched it before.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
What it costs to ignore
Match the format people expect for that query. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Informational queries rarely convert directly, and that is fine
- Change one thing and measure it
Look at the current results to see what the engine rewards. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
The short version
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about search intent before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Informational queries rarely convert directly, and that is fine — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.