Search engines continue to evolve, but SEO strategies have not kept up.
For years, we've relied on keyword research to help us choose specific searches to target, but keyword research often prioritizes the wrong goals.
Keyword research done properly will help you create a balanced keyword strategy for your target market and personas. Prioritize keywords that attract traffic that converts into customers.
When keyword research isn’t done properly, your search will focus on high volume, low intent searches rather than the purchase intent searches that are most likely to lead to conversions.
Conversion-focused SEO campaigns aren't right for every situation, but conversions should be the primary goal for e-commerce, service businesses, lead generation, and any other SEO campaign that aims to impact key business metrics.
The Keyword Research Trap
Marketers often chase keywords with high search volume, resulting in a list of keywords that are relevant but don't drive conversions.
This is the trap of keyword research: chasing loads of highly related keywords while ignoring the intent behind the search.
A few years ago, I worked for a company that specialized in corporate team-building events. We offered a program called “Write a Country Song Like Taylor Swift.” The page for this offering got a lot of organic traffic, but the majority of organic visitors were looking for information about Swift's music, not about corporate team-building.
The Swifties who visit this site would never book a corporate teambuilding event, they are exactly the wrong audience for a corporate teambuilding event.
There's clearly a disconnect between your audience and your offer, but marketers often don't see it as obvious or even ignore it.
As consumers adopt search generation engines like Google AI Overviews and Perplexity.ai, the traps of keyword research become more dangerous.
Keyword research is overrated
Early search engines simply searched for keywords on web pages and returned a list of pages that contained that keyword.
Modern search engines are much more sophisticated and understand the relationship between a searcher's intent and the pages that best fulfill that intent.
It’s time to modernize SEO techniques like keyword research that were developed for the first generation of search engines.
For example, we have advised banks that offer donor-advised fund (DAF) accounts, which allow wealthy donors to take an accelerated tax deduction on their charitable contributions.
After conducting keyword research, the bank decided they wanted to target the keyword “donor-advised fund.”
This keyword is broadly relevant. But who is searching for it? And most importantly, what are they searching for?
After some research, we discovered that what they were looking for was:
- General information about DAF.
- A CPA who understands DAFs.
- How to submit a DIY TAW return to a DAF.
- Donor Advised Fund Accounts.
Banks should target searchers who are looking to open a donor-advised fund account. These keywords are being searched by people looking to open a DAF account. However, the majority of searchers that banks want to target did not have the intent to open an account.
There are better keywords out there that are more likely to generate valuable traffic, such as “open a donor-advised fund account.” However, these keywords have much lower search volume and are more competitive than “donor-advised fund.”
Learn more: Beyond Search Volume: Future-Proof Keyword Research for SEO
Emphasizing relevance instead of intent
Many marketers misunderstand the relationship between relevance and intent.
While relevance and intent are both important, it’s crucial to prioritize intent in order to attract qualified traffic that is more likely to become customers.
Keywords are relevant and Intent. Search intent is related to relevance, but is an entirely different concept.
Relevance is the similarity between the keyword and the content or product you offer. Intent is what drives the searcher to take the next step.
Intent describes the trajectory of a search: what a searcher wants to accomplish with their search.
Search momentum can be both good and bad. If your content meets searcher intent, momentum will move visitors to the next step in the buying process. If your content doesn't meet searcher intent, momentum can make it difficult to change searcher direction.
Search intent captures what the likely results will be after a search.
It's important to understand the likely outcomes of a search. For example, a Taylor Swift fan is unlikely to book a corporate team-building event; they're more likely to buy concert tickets.
Keyword research and analysis tools can help you choose relevant keywords, but they don't offer much guidance on choosing keywords with the right intent.
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Why Keyword Research Fails
Like most marketers, you’ll likely start your SEO campaign with keyword research: creating an exhaustive list of relevant terms and prioritizing them based on search volume and competition.
Let’s be clear: while it’s important to consider keyword relevance, volume, and competition, this approach can be misleading and blunt the targeting of your SEO campaign.
How keyword research selection criteria can be misleading:
- Relevance: Related keywords are not necessarily searched by high-value customers with buying intent, they may just be relevant – for example, the keyword “skiing” is relevant to e-commerce sites that sell skis and ski resorts.
- Search Volume: Many times, different intents generate a large volume of keywords. The actual search volume for the intent you are targeting may only be a small fraction of the total volume for the keyword.
- competition: It is hard to rank for highly competitive keywords. However, highly competitive keywords are competitive precisely because they have high conversion rates. Conversely, low competition keywords usually have low conversion rates.
Keyword research is harder than most marketers think, and these metrics can be misleading if not applied correctly.
To avoid falling into the trap of keyword research, you need to skillfully balance the trade-offs between relevance, volume, and competition. Otherwise, you risk investing significant resources in optimizing your SEO content for keywords that drive traffic but don't convert.
Refining your Keyword Research with Intention
Many SEO campaigns are doomed to fail from the start, especially when marketers select keywords before identifying the search intent most likely to convert.
Don’t start your SEO campaign with keyword research.
Start by surveying your customers.
Before you can choose your keywords, you need to understand the search intent of your most promising customers and which of those intents are most likely to lead to a conversion.
The order of operations is important: Identify the search intent, after that Select a keyword.
Use search intent as a filter: select keywords that match the search intent of your target.
Once you understand your customer's search intent, you can choose keywords and create content that matches your customer's search intent. You should choose an intent that can be fulfilled with your content or product.
To kick off your SEO campaign, start by gathering customer insights from customer conversations, sales calls, and social media to understand:
- Customer Experience
- Questions customers ask
- Information customers need
- What makes a customer convert?
These insights help you understand what information your customers are looking for when making a purchasing decision. These are the search intents you should target.
A better approach to keyword research is:
- Start with customer research
- Map the customer journey
- Identify search intent
- Group related keywords together
- Filter your keyword list based on intent
- Develop content tailored to each intent
Prioritizing search intent over keywords creates more effective content that speaks directly to your audience's needs, improving conversion rates.
Learn more: How to optimize for search intent: 19 actionable tips
Conversion-Focused SEO
Traditional keyword research requires you to optimize for metrics that can be misleading.
A well-targeted SEO campaign gets your content and brand message in front of prospects who are actively researching a purchase. Precise targeting of your campaigns increases conversions.
In addition to improving rankings and traffic, focusing on intent has other benefits:
- Higher conversion rates: Targeting high-intent keywords improves organic conversion rates by providing content that fulfills visitors' queries.
- Marketing Efficiency: By focusing on users who are actively searching for your products, fewer resources are spent on broadly targeted content.
- Cross-Channel InsightsSearch intent analysis provides valuable insights into customer behavior that can be applied to all marketing channels, not just SEO.
Effective SEO campaigns optimize for conversions and sales, not just rankings and traffic. They look beyond keyword relevance, volume, and competition by targeting search intent first and keywords second.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.