This article will cover matching keywords and its intent.

Introduction:  The use of keywords in a SEO strategy has changed over the years as the algorithms have evolved and the importance of keywords will continue to evolve as voice search becomes mainstream.  Every keyword or group of keywords has different intent and understanding that intent will help your product, service or information gain higher visibility in the search engines that will lead to sale or new inquiry.  User intent should be part of your consideration when deciding on what keywords to target for your business.  Don’t fall in the trap of targeting a keyword because it has a high search volume, make sure it is relevant to your business. Let’s get stuck into the process of deciding if the keyword has the intent that matches your business.

How and where can I review if a keyword is relevant to my business?

To help explain the process I will use an example of running a hair care blog and want to write content “how to curl my hair” as I want people to sign up to seminar.

Use a keyword tool like the Adwords keyword planner to research keyword volumes. Once you have selected a number of keywords go to Google.com and google your keyword in the search bar for example “how to curl my hair”.  Review the search results by examining the page titles and meta descriptions to get an understanding of the relevant content that ranks for that particular keyword and that will give you an idea of user intent.  Next, click on the articles in the SERPs and read through these articles to get an understanding of how the article is addressing the query / intent.  Then ask yourself if this keyword and type of content is relevant to your business.  If it does then move onto to the next steps of your investigation.

Can I improve upon the current content that is ranking well?

When reviewing the content of your competitors start by undertaking a SWOT analysis.  List the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats of each article as it will give you an idea of the type of content to write that might better address user intent.  Once you have reviewed the articles go back to the search results, take note note of the keywords listed at the bottom of the page from your Google search in the section called “Searches Related to”.  Ask yourself can I use those keywords as part of my content that will match user intent.  If you feel you can use these keywords then repeat the process above.

Continuing on from our example above on how to curl your hair.  There is an opportunity to go in depth on the topic as you can use straighteners, flat irons and rollers to curl and these types aids are not covered by one article! So we should explore this further by researching how to curl my hair with a straightener, flat irons and rollers to get more information for our article

Now, What’s Next?

After completing this process you should have a handful of keywords and ideas that you can structure your content around.  What I like to do is for each major keyword that I have made note of is to have paragraph around that particular keyword.

The structure of our article “how to curl my hair” would look something like this

  • Different ways to curl my hair
  • Curl my hair with a straightener
  • Curl my hair with a Flat Iron
  • Curl my hair with rolllers

For each of these sub-topics you should include a video along with written “how to steps” and have fun writing / creating the content.

Review the results of your hard work

Once the article has generated activity and is ranking review the statistics.  Log into your Analytics account and review the vanity metrics like the source of the traffic from your article, time on site, bounce rate and pages per session.  These metrics give an indication if the article was successful enough to keep traffic on your website.  If you are tracking specific goals in Google Analytics then see if the article generated new leads or any sales.  If the article had poor results in terms of no sales or a high bounce rate then tweak the article and make some improvements.

There are different ways to achieve the same outcome.  Let me know in the comments section of any additions to include in this article.