How to work with a mixed search intent?
Now that the ‘Helpful Content Update’ is ready, and the message is clear: if a page is not usable, does not score, and does not provide another perspective, it does not come on the SERP (search engine result page). Google has literally released an update that they have called the “Helpful Content Update.” The new update is intended to remove high-scoring content with little value to users from search results.
What we are going to cover
- What is search intent?
- The evolution of Google’s algo updates
- How Google determines the “helpfulness” of content
- Informational symmetry & informational gain with screenshots
- Future SEO Content Frameworks “searcher perspective”
With this guide you will learn how to understand the search intent of your target audience, and how to tactically drive traffic to a business page. By intent we mean the underlying reason why someone is searching. The key to successful SEO.
Search Intent and SEO
Now that the ‘Helpful Content Update’ is ready, it is important to write your content for both people and search engines. Google’s “people-first” strategy emphasizes the importance of creating content that is relevant and valuable to people, rather than just focusing on achieving high search results. By writing your content with the reader in mind and following Google’s guidelines for search engine optimization, you can ensure that your content is accessible to both people and search engines.
Google has indeed become increasingly better at recognizing the search intent of users, so posting ‘thin content’ — or content of poor quality or little value — can lead to lower search results and a decrease in traffic to your website. It is therefore important to only publish content that is of high quality and provides real value to your visitors.
SEO specialists who understand searchers’ perspectives have a huge advantage in understanding the intent behind their searches. This makes it possible to create content that aligns with what people are looking for, which can lead to higher rankings in search results. By predicting search intent, you can work more effectively and direct your efforts in the right way to achieve higher rankings.
1 Google’s Algo
By understanding how Google evaluates the quality of search engine results pages (SERP’s), you can ensure that your SEO strategy is focused on the current and future intentions of users. Winning SEO is focused on the intentions that users care about now, and anticipates what users will care about in the future.
Since 2013, Google has been evolving into a more semantic search engine. A semantic search engine does not only search for specific terms, but also for context and intention. This allows Google to show even more relevant results (relevance is one of the core values in SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization). If you want to understand the concept of Google as a semantic search engine, this is an excellent text to read.
By building on its existing Hummingbird update, Google, through artificial intelligence, wants to better *understand* what the exact meaning or motivation of a particular search query that a user types into Google is.
Now that we have established the basics, we can discuss the future of SEO content.
2 Focus on Perspectives
Rather than trying to create long content, it is better to think about how to approach the keyword or topic from a new perspective while still meeting the search intent. It is important to ensure that the content you produce is unique and valuable to your audience.
For example, you can search for “bone broth” on Google, and then add search terms such as “[recipe]” or “[benefits]” to see how you can approach the search intent from different perspectives. This can help you understand how to optimize your content for semantic search.
Let’s check the search results for example:
- bone broth
- bone broth recipe
- bone broth benefits
Google search for: bone broth, + [recipe], [benefits]
You can see that the same articles are displayed for short and long-tail keywords. Why? This is because of how Google compiles the SERP’s. Google wants to offer the article that is most likely to complete the search process.
3 Usability of content
To better understand ‘The Helpful Update,’ you can use the word ‘usability’ instead of ‘helpful.’ ‘Usability’ is a better term in this case because it emphasizes the usefulness of content to users.”Meaning” is not the same as “intention.”
Search query: bone broth
If an article contains information about bone broth, but no information about the benefits, for example, a % of the users have to go back to Google and search again. That is why you hear more and more focus on search intent.
Long-tail keywords (niche searches) with little to no monthly search volume can and will score for main topics if enough users perform consecutive searches for those “search intents.”
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