User Intent SEO (Informational and Transactional)

Understanding User Intent

User Intent, this is what the search engines love and they crawl every page out there in cyberspace looking for great content to index that matches a specific search query. 

Search marketers and webmaster have been doing keyword research and adding them as needed in their SEO strategy for a long-time now and while keywords are still needed why not change those keywords into (Search Query Keywords) or (Key Phrases) based on users intentions. There are two specific user intentions i'm going to focus on;

• Informational-Most queries are informational based (Looking for a product or service)
  
• Transactional-Queries are more specific and lead to a transaction(Buy product or service)

Informational queries can lead to transactions, that is why it is important to optimize each page for these two types of queries. Below we will take a look at the steps on how to optimize your site for these types of search queries. Feel free to copy and paste, just insert your own information.

First-Lets add those (Query Keywords) in the Meta-tags. Take a look at an example for the search query "How much does a home security alarm system cost":

<title>Alarm Packages</title>
<meta name='description' content='Our home and business security alarm system packages are tailored to fit your individual needs with no cost and free installation' />
<meta name='keywords' content='How much does a home security alarm system cost,cost of home and business alarm systems,buy home security alarm system' />


How to find informational and transactional search query keywords:
There are many keyword programs out there. I like to use:

• Google's Adword keyword Tool gives you good data on the number of searches performed and how competitive the keyword is.
• Google Analytics allows you to paste some code into your pages and Google will track the visits, where they come from, what keywords and phrases were queried to find your pages and so much more.
• Using your own CMS (content management system) or your own analytics software you can analyze and study where your website visitors are coming from.
  

The next step is to add image tags to your photos, this is know as an alt-tag and adds a description to the image. Check out the image above there is a description below it and when you scroll over it with your mouse you can see alternative text.

Next you want to add user intent search queries into the web copy of your page in the header, body and footer. You can bold the keywords to make it stand out. Make sure the content is well written and descriptive.

You can add user intent keyword links to other pages that correlate with the current page and site. When you socialize your page be sure to create back-links with the chosen keywords and add a description.

Next I would head over to Schema Creator and add micro-data for products and services. Micro-data markup enables search engines to understand information on web pages and provide more richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on any given webpage.You can add user intent queries to the descriptions of the micro-data.

Geo-Tagging your products and services help with local search for mobile devices. Here is a Geo-Tag Generator that will automatically produce the code for you to copy into the HTML of a web page.

I hope these basics of User Intent SEO can help your bottom line. Just remember to think and act like a consumer asking search engines questions. Add those questions and answer them in your web copy. Socialize them on Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter etc. Make great content that is informative and leads to a transaction by making the call to action easy to find and simple to execute.

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