SEO Fundamentals #2: Keyword Strategy and User Intent for eCommerce

An effective SEO campaign must include a keyword strategy. You can optimize your keyword strategy once you understand user intent. Take a look at this blog to see how you can match your keyword strategy with user intent.

Types of User Intent

There are four types of user intent:

1. Informational: users are looking for educational content around a specific topic (ex. What is SEO?)
2. Navigational: users want to get to a specific website (ex. inbound marketing)
3. Commercial investigation: customers are getting ready to buy and are comparing products or services
4. Transactional: customers are looking to buy something specific to solve a problem or fulfill a need

By understanding user intent and its categories, you can streamline a better keyword strategy based on your ultimate goal.

How to Plan Your Keyword Strategy

It is now time to work on your keyword strategy. By now, you should have already created a list of keywords based on volume and keyword difficulty. To push this list a bit further, we will create a spreadsheet highlighting search intent.

Now, we will place each of the keywords we gathered under the correct intent.

Next, you will build a streamlined keyword strategy to help you guide your content creation process.

Note: informational queries tend to bring the most traffic to web pages because they are educational content. On the other hand, transactional queries have lower volume/traffic potential but are a better target for pages aiming to convert visitors into customers.

How to Spot Search Intent

This list of keywords will be the core of your SEO campaign, meaning that the more accurate and complete it is, the better. To help you expand your list, here are simple ways to spot search intent when doing keyword research:

• Informational keywords tend to have one of these words within them: What, How, Who, Where, Why, Guide, Tutorial, Resource, Ideas, Tips
• Navigational keywords tend to have one of these words within them: Brand names, Name of a product, Name of a service
• Commercial investigation keywords tend to have one of these words within them: Best, Top, Review, Size, Color, Comparison
• Transactional keywords tend to have one of these words within them: Buy, Coupon, Order, Purchase, Cheap, Price, Pricing

Sweet Tips from Ally:

Understanding the intent behind a query will take you further than just doing keyword optimization alone. Remember that Google is becoming increasingly good at interpreting customer’s search behavior. Topics and intention are the real drivers of rankings nowadays, so you must figure out what your target audience is really looking for.