Posted by randfish

Can you learn SEO in an hour? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, at least when it comes to the fundamentals! 

With this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we’re kicking off something special: a six-part series of roughly ten-minute-long videos designed to deliver core SEO concepts efficiently and effectively. It’s our hope that this will serve as a helpful resource for a wide range of people:

• Beginner SEOs looking to get acquainted with the field concisely & comprehensively
• Clients, bosses, and stakeholders who would benefit from an enhanced understanding of your work
• New team members who need quick and easy onboarding
• Colleagues with SEO-adjacent roles, such as web developers and software engineers

Today we’ll be covering Part 1: SEO Strategy with the man who wrote the original guide on SEO, our friend Rand. Settle in, and stay tuned next Friday for our second video covering keyword research!

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of the Whiteboard Friday series. I’m Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, and I’m here with you today because I’m going to deliver a one-hour guide to SEO, front and back, so that you can learn in just an hour the fundamentals of the practice and be smarter at choosing a great SEO firm to work with, hiring SEO people. 

A handy SEO resource for your clients, team, and colleagues

If you are already in SEO, you might pick up some tips and tactics that you didn’t otherwise know or hadn’t previously considered. I want to ask those of you who are sort of intermediate level and advanced level SEOs — and I know there are many of you who have historically watched me on Whiteboard Friday and I really appreciate that — to give this video a chance even though it is at the beginner level, because my hope is that it will be valuable to you to send to your clients, your potential customers, people who join your team and work with you, developers or software engineers or web devs who you are working with and whose help you need but you want them to understand the fundamentals of SEO.

If those are the people that you’re talking to, excellent. This series is for you. We’re going to begin with SEO strategy. That is our first part. Then we’ll get into things like keyword research and technical SEO and link building and all of that good stuff as well. 

The essentials: What is SEO, and what does it do?

So first off, SEO is search engine optimization. It is essentially the practice of influencing or being able to control some of the results that Google shows when someone types in or speaks a query to their system.

I say Google. You can influence other search engines, like Bing and DuckDuckGo and Yahoo and Seznam if you’re in the Czech Republic or Baidu. But we are primarily focused on Google because Google has more than a 90% market share in the United States and, in fact, in North America and South America, in most of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East with a few exceptions.

Start with business goals

So SEO is a tactic. It’s a way to control things. It is not a business goal. No one forms a new company or sits down with their division and says, “Okay, we need to rank for all of these keywords.” Instead what you should be saying, what hopefully is happening in your teams is, “We have these business goals.”

Example: “Grow our online soccer jersey sales to a web-savvy, custom heavy audience.”

Let’s say we’re an online e-commerce shop and we sell customized soccer jerseys, well, football for those of you outside of the United States. So we want to grow our online soccer jersey sales. Great, that is a true business goal. We’re trying to build a bigger audience. We want to sell more of these jerseys. In order to do that, we have marketing goals that we want to achieve, things like we want to build brand awareness.

Next, marketing goals

Build brand awareness

We want more people to know who we are, to have heard of our particular brand, because people who have heard of us are going to be more likely to buy from us. The first time you hear about someone, very unlikely to buy. The seventh time you’ve heard about someone, much more likely to buy from them. So that is a good marketing goal, and SEO can help with that. We’ll talk about that in a sec.

Grow top-of-funnel traffic

You might want to grow top-of-funnel traffic. We want more people coming to the site overall so that we can do a better job of figuring out who is the right audience for us and converting some of those people, retargeting some of those people, capturing emails from some of those people, all those good things. 

Attract ready-to-buy fans

We want to attract ready-to-buy fans, people who are chomping at the bit to buy our soccer jerseys, customize them and get them shipped.

SEO, as a strategy, is essentially a set of tactics, things that you will do in the SEO world to rank for different keywords in the search engines or control and influence what already ranks in there so that you can achieve your marketing goals so that you can achieve your business goals.

Don’t get this backwards. Don’t start from a place of SEO. Especially if you are an SEO specialist or a practitioner or you’re joining a consulting firm, you should always have an excellent idea of what these are and why the SEO tactics that you are undertaking fit into them. If you don’t, you should be asking those questions before you begin any SEO work.

Otherwise you’re going to accomplish things and do things that don’t have the impact or don’t tie directly to the impact that the business owners care about, and that’s going to mean probably you won’t get picked up for another contract or you won’t accomplish the goals that mean you’re valuable to the team or you do things that people don’t necessarily need and want in the business and therefore you are seen as a less valuable part of it.

Finally, move into SEO strategy

But if you’re accomplishing things that can clearly tie to these, the opposite. People will really value what you do. 

Rank for low-demand, high-conversion keywords

So SEO can do things like rank for low demand, things that don’t have a lot of searches per month but they are high conversion likely keywords, keywords like “I am looking for a customized Seattle Sounders soccer jersey that’s in the away colors.” Well, there’s not a lot of search demand for that exact phrase. But if you’re searching for it, you’re very likely to convert. 

Earn traffic from high-demand, low-competition, less commerce-focused keywords

You could try and earn traffic from high-demand, low competition keywords that are less focused directly on e-commerce. So it could be things like “Seattle Sounders news” or “Seattle Sounders stats” or a comparison of “Portland Timbers versus Seattle Sounders.” These are two soccer or football clubs in the Pacific Northwest. 

Build content that attracts links and influencer engagement

Or you might be trying to do things like building content that attracts links and influencer engagement so that in the future you can rank for more competitive keywords. We’ll talk about that in a sec. SEO can do some amazing things, but there are also things that it cannot do.

What SEO can do:

If you put things in here, if you as an SEO pitch to your marketing team or your business owners that SEO can do things that it can’t, you’re going to be in trouble. So when we compose an SEO strategy, a set of tactics that tries to accomplish marketing goals that tie to business goals, SEO can do things like:

• Attract searchers that are seeking your content.
• Control how your brand is seen in search results when someone searches for your particular name. 
• Nudge searchers toward queries by influencing what gets suggested in the auto suggest or by suggesting related searches or people also ask boxes. 

Anything that shows up in the search results, nearly anything can be influenced by what we as SEOs can do.

What SEO cannot do:

Grow or create search demand on its own

But SEO cannot grow or create search demand by itself. So if someone says, “Hey, I want us to get more traffic for this specific keyword,” if you’re already ranking number one and you have some videos showing in the results and you’re also in the image results and you’ve got maybe a secondary page that links off to you from the results, you might say, “Hey, there’s just not more demand,” and SEO by itself can’t create that additional demand.

Build brand (by itself)

SEO also can’t build brand, at least not by itself. It can certainly be a helpful part of that structure. But if someone says, “Hey, I want us to be better known among this audience,”you can say, “Well, SEO can help a little, but it can’t build a brand on its own, and it certainly can’t build brand perception on its own.” People are going to go and visit your website. They’re going to go and experience, have an interaction with what you’ve created on the web. That is going to be far more of a brand builder, a brand indicator than just what appears in the search results. So SEO can’t do that alone. 

Directly convert customers

It also can’t directly convert customers. A lot of the time what we find is that someone will do a great job of ranking, but when you actually reach the website, when visitors reach the website, they are unsatisfied by the search, which by the way is one of the reasons why this one-hour guide is going to include a section on searcher satisfaction.

When Google sees over time that searchers are unsatisfied by a result, they will push that result down in the rankings and find someone who does a great job of satisfying searchers, and they will rank them instead. So the website has to do this. It is part of SEO. It’s certainly part of the equation, but SEO can’t influence it or control it on its own.

WORK OVERNIGHT!

Finally, last but not least, SEO cannot work overnight. It just won’t happen. SEO is a long-term investment. It is very different from paid search ads, PPC, also called SEM sometimes, buying from Google ads or from Bing ads and appearing in the sponsored results. That is a tactic where you can pour money in and optimize and get results out in 24 hours. SEO is more like a 24-month long process. 

The SEO Growth Path

I’ve tried to show that here. The fundamental concept is when you have a new website, you need to earn these things — links and engagement and historical performance in the rankings.

As you earn those things, other people are linking to you from around the web, people are talking about you, people are engaging with your pages and your brand, people start searching for your brand specifically, people are clicking you more in the search results and then having good experiences on your website, as all those great things happen, you will grow your historical engagement and links and ranking factors, all these things that we sort of put into the bucket of the authority and influence of a website.

3–6 months: Begin to rank for things in the long tail of search demand

As that grows, you will be able to first, over time, this might be three to six months down here, you might be able to rank for a few keywords in the long tail of search demand. 

6–9 months: Begin to rank for more and more competitive keywords

After six to nine months, if you’re very good at this, you may be able to rank for more and more competitive keywords.

12–18 months: Compete for tougher keywords

As you truly grow a brand that is well-known and well thought of on the internet and by search engines, 12 to 18 months in, maybe longer, you may be able to compete for tougher and tougher keywords. When I started the Moz website, back in the early days of Google, it took me years, literally two or three years before I was ranking for anything in Google, anything in the search engines, and that is because I had to first earn that brand equity, that trust, that relationship with the search engines, those links and that engagement.

Today this is more true than ever because Google is so good at estimating these things. All right. I look forward to hearing all about the amazing strategies and structures that you’ve got probably in the comments down below. I’m sure it will be a great thread. We’ll move on to the second part of our one-hour guide next time — keyword research. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by TheMozTeam

Mozzers believe in doing good, whether we’re helping new SEOs learn the ropes, encouraging young girls to consider a career in STEM, or just maintaining a dog-friendly (and thus smile-friendly) office. It’s why so much of our content and tools are available for free. It’s why Moz has a generous employee donation-match program that matched over $500,000 between 2013 and 2017, supporting organizations making the world a more just and charitable place. It’s why we partner with programs like Year Up, Ignite, and Techbridge to inspire the next generation of technology leaders.

And of course, TAGFEE is the beating heart of everything we do. It’s part of our DNA. That’s why we’re incredibly proud (and humbled!) to announce that our very own CEO and Disney-karaoke-extraordinaire, Sarah Bird, has been accepted into The Aspen Institute’s 23rd class of Henry Crown Fellows, a program whose values resonate deeply with our own.

The Henry Crown Fellowship is an influential program that enables leaders to embrace their inner do-gooder. Every year, around twenty leaders from around the world are accepted into the fellowship. Having proven their success in the private sector, each new Fellow uses this opportunity to play a similar role in their communities, their country, or the world.

Pretty exciting, right? The best part of all, though: it’s not just about reflection. It’s about action. Fellows in the program have launched over 2,500 leadership ventures, using the opportunity to tackle everything from improving healthcare access, to battling domestic violence, to enhancing sustainable living, and beyond. It’s important, highly impactful stuff.

“Executives are often criticized for building successful businesses without giving back to the communities that helped them along the way,” says Sarah, “but we must lead as much in our communities as we do in our businesses.”

Tech companies and executives often face deserved scrutiny for the second- and third-order impacts of their successes. It’s a hard truth that the benefits and costs of technology advances aren’t shared equally between all people, and the cost to our environment is often not fully accounted for. The consequence is an understandable backlash against technologists.

“In order to change this,” adds Sarah, “we need to earnestly and with rigor dive into the sociological and ecological consequences of our work. Those of us with great power and privilege need to recognize and embrace our role in creating a more just and healthy future. I feel called to make a difference, and I’m glad there is a program out there to provide a framework and accountability for action.”

Here at Moz, we’ve been lucky enough to benefit from Sarah’s influence for years — we know she’s good people, inside and out. And now, we can’t wait to see her make waves in the world at large with the support of the Henry Crown Fellowship.

We’d love for you to join us in congratulating her in the comments below, and bonus points if you share the cause that’s closest to your heart!

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Posted by Tom.Capper

Given the increasing importance of brand in SEO, it seems a cruel irony that many household name-brands seem to struggle with managing the channel. Yet, in my time at Distilled, I’ve seen just that: numerous name-brand sites in various states of stagnation and even more frustrated SEO managers attempting to prevent said stagnation. 

Despite global brand recognition and other established advantages that ought to drive growth, the reality is that having a household name doesn’t ensure SEO success. In this post, I’m going to explore why large, well-known brands can run into difficulties with organic performance, the patterns I’ve noticed, and some of the recommended tactics to address those challenges.

What we talk about when we talk about a legacy brand

For the purposes of this post, the term “legacy brand” applies to companies that have a very strong association with the product they sell, and may well have, in the past, been the ubiquitous provider for that product. This could mean that they were household names in the 20th century, or it could be that they pioneered and dominated their field in the early days of mass consumer web usage. A few varied examples (that Distilled has never worked with or been contacted by) include:

• Wells Fargo (US)
• Craigslist (US)
• Tesco (UK)

These are cherry-picked, potentially extreme examples of legacy brands, but all three of the above, and most that fit this description have shown a marked decline in the last five years, in terms of organic visibility (confirmed by Sistrix, my tool of choice — your tool-of-choice may vary). It’s a common issue for large, well-established sites — peaking in 2013 and 2014 and never again reaching those highs.

Given that large, well-known brands aren’t performing well, one would think that less known brands (brands that don’t fit the above description) would be closing the gap. But it’s the opposite. In fact, said brands are under-performing in organic and showing signs of stagnation — and they aren’t showing any signs of catching up.

The question is: why does it keep happening?

Reason 1: Brand

Quite possibly the biggest hurdle standing in the way of a brand’s performance is the brand itself. This may seem like a bit of an odd one — we’d already established that the companies we’re talking about are big, recognized, household names. That in and of itself should help them in SEO, right?

The thing is, though, a lot of these big household names are recognized, but they’re not the one-stop shops that they used to be.

Here’s how the above name-brand examples are performing on search:

Other dominant, clearly vertical-leading brands in the UK, in general, are also not doing so well in branded search:

There’s a lot of potential reasons for why this may be — and we’ll even address some of them later — but a few notable ones include:

• Complacency — particularly for brands that were early juggernauts of the web, they may have forgotten the need to reinforce their brand image and recognition.
• More and more credible competitors. When you’re the only competent operator, as many of these brands once were, you had the whole pie. Now, you have to share it.
• People trust search engines. In a lot of cases, ubiquitous brands decline, while the generic term is on the rise.

Check out this for the real estate example in the UK:

Rightmove and Zoopla are the two biggest brands in this space and have been for some time. There’s only one line there that’s trending upwards, though, and it’s the generic term, “houses for sale.”

What can I do about this?

Basically, get a move on! A lot of incumbents have been very slow to take action on things like top-of-funnel content, or only produce low-effort, exceptionally dry social media posts (I’ve posted before about some of these tactics here.) In fairness, it’s easy to see why — these channels and approaches likely have the least measurable returns. However, leaving a vacuum higher in your funnel is playing with fire, especially when you’re a recognized name. It opens an opportunity for smaller players to close the gap in recognition — at almost no cost.

Reason 2: Tech debt

I’m sure many people reading this will have experienced how hard it can be to get technical changes — particularly higher effort ones — implemented by larger, older organizations. This can stem from complex bureaucracy, aging and highly bespoke platforms, risk aversion, and, particularly for SEO, an inability to get senior buy-in for what can often be fairly abstract changes with little guaranteed reward.

What can I do about this?

At Distilled, we run into these challenges fairly often. I’ve seen dev queues that span, literally, for years. I’ve also seen organizations that are completely unable to change the most basic information on their sites, such as opening times or title tags. In fact, it was this exact issue that prompted the development of our ODN platform a few years ago as a way to circumvent technical limitations and prove the benefits when we did so.

There are less heavy-duty options available — GTM can be used for a range of changes as the last resort, albeit without the measurement component. CDN-level solutions like Cloudflare’s edge workers are also starting to gain traction within the SEO community.

Eventually, though, it’s necessary to tackle the problem at the source — by making headway within the politics of the organization. There’s a whole other post to be had there, if not several, but basically, it comes down to making yourself heard without undermining anyone. I’ve found that focusing on the downside is actually the most effective angle within big, risk-averse bureaucracies — essentially preying on the risk-aversion itself — as well as shouting loudly about any successes, however small.

Reason 3: Not updating tactics due to long-standing, ingrained practices

In a way, this comes back to risk aversion and politics — after all, legacy brands have a lot to lose. One particular manifestation I’ve often noticed in larger organizations is ongoing campaigns and tactics that haven’t been linked to improved rankings or revenue in years.

One conversation with a senior SEO at a major brand left me quite confused. I recall he said to me something along the lines of “we know this campaign isn’t right for us strategically, but we can’t get buy-in for anything else, so it’s this or lose the budget”. Fantastic.

This type of scenario can become commonplace when senior decision-makers don’t trust their staff — often, it’s a CMO, or similar executive leader, that hasn’t dipped their toe in SEO for a decade or more. When they do, they are unpleasantly surprised to discover that their SEO team isn’t buying any links this week and, actually, hasn’t for quite some time. Their reaction, then, is predictable: “No wonder the results are so poor!”

What can I do about this?

Unfortunately, you may have to humor this behavior in the short term. That doesn’t mean you should start (or continue) buying links, but it might be a good idea to ensure there’s similar-sounding activity in your strategy while you work on proving the ROI of your projects.

Medium-term, if you can get senior stakeholders out to conferences (I highly recommend SearchLove, though I may be biased), softly share articles and content “they may find interesting”, and drown them in news of the success of whatever other programs you’ve managed to get headway with, you can start to move them in the right direction.

Reason 4: Race to the bottom

It’s fair to say that, over time, it’s only become easier to launch an online business with a reasonably well-sorted site. I’ve observed in the past that new entrants don’t necessarily have to match tenured juggernauts like-for-like on factors like Domain Authority to hit the top spots.

As a result, it’s become common-place to see plucky, younger businesses rising quickly, and, at the very least, increasing the apparent level of choice where historically a legacy business might have had a monopoly on basic competence.

This is even more complicated when price is involved. Most SEOs agree that SERP behavior factors into rankings, so it’s easy to imagine legacy businesses, which disproportionately have a premium angle, struggling for clicks vs. attractively priced competitors. Google does not understand or care that you have a premium proposition — they’ll throw you in with the businesses competing purely on price all the same.

What can I do about this?

As I see it, there are two main approaches. One is abusing your size to crowd out smaller players (for instance, disproportionately targeting the keywords where they’ve managed to find a gap in your armor), and the second is, essentially, Conversion Rate Optimization.

Simple tactics like sorting a landing page by default by price (ascending), having clicky titles with a value-focused USP (e.g. free delivery), or well targeted (and not overdone) post-sales retention emails — all go a long way to mitigating the temptation of a cheaper or hackier competitor.

Reason 5: Super-aggregators (Amazon, Google)

In a lot of verticals, the pie is getting smaller, so it stands to reason the dominant players will be facing a diminishing slice.

A few obvious examples:

• Local packs eroding local landing pages
• Google Flights, Google Jobs, etc. eroding specialist sites
• Amazon taking a huge chunk of e-commerce search

What can I do about this?

Again, there are two separate angles here, and one is a lot harder than the other. The first is similar to some of what I’ve mentioned above — move further up the funnel and lock in business before this ever comes to your prospective client Googling your head term and seeing Amazon and/or Google above you. This is only a mitigating tactic, however.

The second, which will be impossible for many or most businesses, is to jump into bed with the devil. If you ever do have the opportunity to be a data partner behind a Google or Amazon product, you may do well to swallow your pride and take it. You may be the only one of your competitors left in a few years, and if you don’t, it’ll be someone else.

Wrapping up

While a lot of the issues relate to complacency, and a lot of my suggested solutions relate to reinvesting as if you weren’t a dominant brand that might win by accident, I do think it’s worth exploring the mechanisms by which this translates into poorer performance.

This topic is unavoidably very tinted by my own experiences and opinions, so I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Similarly, I’m conscious that any one of my five reasons could have been a post in its own right — which ones would you like to see more fleshed out?

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Posted by TheMozTeam

This post was originally published on the STAT blog.

In the STAT whitepaper, Using search intent to connect with consumers, we looked at how SERP features change with a searcher’s intent — informational, commercial, transactional, or local. It was so chock-full of research that it sparked oodles of other content inspiration — from the basics of building an intent-based keyword list to setting up your own search intent project, to Scott Taft’s guide to building your own search intent dashboard.

But while doing the research for the whitepaper, we found ourselves pondering another question: is there a similar relationship between search intent and the kind of page content that Google sources results from?

We know from our study that as searchers head down the intent funnel, the SERP feature landscape shifts accordingly. For example, Google serves up progressively more shopping boxes, which help close the deal, as a searcher moves from awareness to purchase.

So, as consumers hunt for that perfect product, does the content that Google serves up shift from, say, category pages to product pages? To get to the bottom of this mystery, we mounted a three-pronged attack.

Prong 1: Uncover the top SERP players

Since Google delivers the content they deem most helpful, figuring out who their SERP favs are ensured that we were analyzing the best performing content.

To do this, we used the same 6,422 retail keywords from our original research, segmented them by search intent, and then gathered the top 12 results (give or take a few) that appeared on each SERP.

This gave us:

• 6,338 informational intent results,
• 35,210 commercial intent results,
• 24,633 transactional intent results,
• and 10,573 local intent results

…to analyze the stink out of. (That’s 76,754 results all told.)

From there, we dug into root domains (e.g. eBay.com and Amazon.com) to uncover the four most frequently occurring businesses for each search intent category.

We made an executive decision to exclude Google, who claimed top billing across the board, from our analysis for two reasons. One, because we attribute shopping boxes and images to them, which show up a lot for retail keywords, and two, because they aren’t exactly a competitor you can learn from.

Prong 2: Identify content page managers

After compiling the winningest sites to snoop on, it was time to see what kind of content they were offering up to the Google gods — which should’ve been easy, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, examining URL structures for frequently occurring page markers is a somewhat painful process.

Some sites, like Homedepot.com (who we wish had made the list for this very reason), have clean, easy to decipher URL structures: all product and category pages are identified with a “/p/” and “/b/” that always show up in the same spot in the URL.

And then you have the Amazon.coms of the world that use a mix of seemingly random markers, like “/s?rh=” and “/dp” that appear all over the place.

In the end — thanks to Stack Overflow, SequelPro, and a lot of patience — we were able to classify our URLs, bringing us to our third and final prong.

Prong 3: Mash everything together and analyze

Once we got all of our ducks in a row, it was time to get our super-sleuth on.

Informational intent (6,338 results)

This is the very top of the intent funnel. The searcher has identified a need and is looking for information on the best solution — is a [laptop] or [desktop computer] the right choice for their home office; what’s the difference between a [blender] and a [food processor] when making smoothies?

Thanks to the retail nature of our keywords, three product powerhouses — Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy — rose to the top, along with Wikipedia, whose sole purpose in life is to provide the kind of information that searchers usually want to see at this stage of intent.

Although Wikipedia doesn’t have page markers, we chose to categorize their search results as product pages. This is because each Wikipedia entry typically focuses on a single person, place, or thing. Also, because they weren’t important to our analysis: while Wikipedia is a search competitor, they’re not a product competitor. (We still love you though, Wikipedia!)

Diving into the type of content that Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy served up (the stuff we were really after), category pages surfaced as the preferred choice.

Given the wide net that a searcher is casting with their informational query, it made sense to see more category pages at this stage — they help searchers narrow down their hunt by providing a wide range of options to choose from.

What did have us raising our eyebrows a little was the number of product pages that appeared. Product pages showcase one specific item and are typically optimized for conversion, so we expected to see these in large quantities further down the funnel — when a searcher has a better idea of what they want.

Commercial intent (35,210 results)

When it comes to a commercial intent query, the searcher is starting to dig deeper into the product they’re after — they’re doing comparative research, reading reviews, and looking into specific functionality.

Here, Amazon continued to rule the URL roost, Wikipedia dropped off, eBay judo-chopped Walmart out of second place, and Best Buy stayed put at the bottom.

In terms of the content that these sites offered up, we saw the addition of review pages from Amazon, and buyer guides from Amazon, eBay, and Best Buy. We figured this would be the case, seeing as how we used modifiers like “best,” “compare,” and “reviews” to apply commercial intent to our keywords.

But while these two types of content fit perfectly with the intent behind a commercial query, especially reviews, oddly enough they still paled in comparison to the number of category and product pages. Weird, right?

Transactional intent (24,633 results)

At the transactional intent stage of the game, the searcher has narrowed their hunt down to a few best options and is ready to throw their hard-earned shekels at the winner.

As far as the most frequently appearing sites go, there was a little do-si-do between eBay and Walmart, but overall, these top four sites did an excellent job following searchers down the intent funnel.

In terms of the kind of pages appearing, once again, we saw a huge number of category pages. Product pages made a respectable showing, but given the readiness to buy at the bottom of the funnel, we expected to see the scales tip in their favor.

Alack and alas, no dice.

Local intent (10,573 results)

Technically, we categorize local intent as a subsection of transactional intent. It’s likely that the only reason a searcher would be considering an in-store visit is if the product is something they want to take home with them. But because local searches typically surface different results from our other transactional queries, we look at them separately.

Here, Amazon’s reign was finally usurped by its biggest competitor, Walmart, and Yelp made a stunning first appearance to knock Best Buy down and eBay off the list.

Given that local intent searchers are on the hunt for a brick-and-mortar store, it made sense that Walmart would win out over Amazon. That said, it’s an incredible feat that Amazon doesn’t let a lack of physical location derail its retail dominance, especially when local is the name of the game (a location is literally part of these queries).

As for Yelp, they’re a trusted source for people trying to find a business IRL — so it wasn’t surprising to see them jump on our local intent SERPs. Like Wikipedia, Yelp doesn’t have product or category pages per se, but they do have markers that indicate pages with multiple business listings (we classified these as category pages), as well as markers that indicate single business listings (our product pages). We also found markers for reviews, which were a perfect fit for our analysis.

Finally, when it came to content, category and product pages (again!) showed up the most on these SERPs. So what’s going on here?

The (unexpected) takeaway

When we set out to examine the type of content that appears for the different search intents, we expected to see far more variation from one level to the next. We thought we’d find lots of category pages for informational intent, more reviews and buyer guides for commercial intent, and mostly product pages for transactional intent.

Instead, we found that category pages are Google’s top choice for retail keywords throughout all levels of search intent. Regardless of how specific a query is, category pages seem to be the first point of access when hunting for retail items. So why might this be?

Looking to our winning sites for answers, it appears that intent-blended pages are the bomb dot com for Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Best Buy.

Their category pages contain: an image of each type of product and short, descriptive copy to help searchers narrow down their options (informational intent); a review or rating system for quick comparisons (commercial intent); and pricing information and a clear way to make a purchase (transactional intent).

Following any of the items to their designated product page — the second most returned type of content — you’ll find a similar intent-blended approach. In fact, by having alternative suggestions, like “people also bought” and “similar products,” appear on them, they almost resemble category pages.

This product page approach is different from what we often see with smaller boutique-style shops. Take Stutterheim for example (they sell raincoats perfect for our Vancouver weather). Their product pages have a single focus: buy this one thing.

Since smaller shops don’t have a never-ending supply of goods, their product pages have to push harder for the transaction — no distractions allowed. Large retailers like Amazon? They have enough stuff to keep searchers around until they stumble across something they like.

To find out what type of content you should serve at each step of the intent funnel, segment your keywords by search intent and track which of your pages rank, as well as how well they convert. This will help reveal what your searchers find most useful.

Ready to get your mitts on even more intent-based insights? Grab the full whitepaper: Using search intent to connect with consumers.

What search-intent insights have you dug up? Let us know in the comments!

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