How to Find a Website Visitor’s User Intent (and Why It Matters)

We live in a world that prioritizes personalization. Customers no longer want generic experiences. They want companies to tap into the troves of data now available and provide customized experiences and offers.

Has your website joined the movement toward personalization?

Personalization begins with knowing what your customers want and what motivates them to visit your website. This knowledge behind their action is their user intent.

We will unravel how user intent changed in 2024 and why investing in this marketing insight will dramatically change your results.

What Is User Intent in 2024?

Attracting users used to center around WHAT users were searching. Were they searching for marketing software? Relevant brands would use marketing software keywords to attract and convert those customers.

User intent added a layer to that process of attracting and converting customers. Instead of just understanding WHAT users are searching for, brands must now know WHY customers are searching for information.

Four primary user intents define why users perform an online search and what they hope to achieve from their searches:

• Informational: The user is seeking information about a topic.
• Commercial: The user is researching and comparing various products.
• Navigational: The user is seeking a specific site.
• Transactional: The user is ready to buy.

Think about a simple search for chocolate cake. A person searching for cake might be looking for a birthday cake, a wedding cake, a cake recipe, or a local bakery. Knowing what they’re looking for isn’t enough to market to that person. A brand must understand the purpose behind the search or the user intent.

Because data is more accessible, users expect more from brands, such as understanding their intent. When brands can tap into a user’s intent to create personalized experiences around that intent, they’re more likely to see positive returns. On average, 89% of marketers see a positive ROI from personalization.

Image from Exploding Topics

Why User Intent Remains a Cornerstone to Marketing

The return on investment from using user intent is visible in several ways. All these ways indirectly lead back to sales and will increase your conversion rate.

Defines Relevant Experiences

Most importantly, user intent tells you the experiences your customers will most likely respond to. When you craft a personalized website experience for each visitor, you consider their different intents.

For example, someone with an informational intent is searching for resources, so they’re most interested in your resources page. However, a visitor showing a transactional intent would respond best to a landing page or product page.

Identifying intent is the first step in crafting those unique experiences, ensuring everyone sees what’s most relevant to them increases your chances of converting them with appropriate solutions.

Improves Search Visibility

User intent is also often called search intent since most marketers use it in SEO. In SEO, Google uses intent to deliver more relevant content to the user’s search engine results page. It examines and defines search queries based on intent and then pulls content matching that intent.

That way, when someone searches for “where to buy hiking boots,” they won’t see content discussing how hiking boots are manufactured.

Creating content that Google ranks in relevant searches will, in turn, increase your online visibility by showing your content in more searches, bringing that relevant traffic to your websites.

Boosts Content Quality

You’re creating content for more reasons than just to appease an algorithm. While creating SEO content is essential and can improve your visibility, converting that traffic your SEO efforts brought in is even more critical.

That’s why intent goes beyond just search intent and optimizing for SEO. It should impact what content you create and how you write your blog posts. Each blog post should match an intended purpose to connect best with traffic coming in.

To create high-quality content around intent, research keywords using a tool like SEMrush to find high-traffic keywords. Most keyword research tools will also tell you the search query’s search intent so you can create content around it. That way, the traffic doesn’t just come to your site but sticks around for a while.

How to Discover Your User’s Intent

If you’re ready to improve the quality and relevancy of your content, begin with these tactics to discover your users’ search intent.

1. Use Research Tools

The simplest method for identifying intent is using keyword research tools. Look up your content’s topic in a research tool, and it will tell you what user intent is often associated with that search term.

The benefit of using this method is the convenience of the tools. However, they’re not always 100% accurate, so you should consider using them alongside other strategies when building a user intent experience and content.

2. Analyze Context Clues

You can manually analyze content topics to identify their intent. Use context clues to identify why someone might search for a specific phrase. Then, craft a page or content around that intent that will appear in relevant searches or onsite recommendations.

For instance, your conversion copy is content built around selling a product or service. You want people to find that content when they’re ready to buy. You can use hot words like “buy now” in the content to attract and show up in transactional searches.

3. Monitor Customer Interactions

The first two tips centered around identifying search terms. A user search intent is often synonymous with search engine optimization. While keywords can provide a clue to a person’s intent, they’re only one piece of the puzzle. Search terms may even be associated with multiple intents.

For example, the phrase “security software” could signal that someone would like to learn more about what it is or the person searching that phrase could be someone looking for a software product to buy.

If you would like to master website personalization, you need to create an on-page data collection process. Hushly’s data analytics system monitors what content users read and the pages they visit. Compounding that data with the search term that sent them to your site, this data provides a complete picture of what they’re looking for, allowing your site to adjust and recommend the most relevant solutions.

4. Collect User Feedback

Asking the user directly will be the most accurate method for identifying a visitor’s intent. However, not everyone would complete a survey, so other strategies are necessary.

Hushly changes the odds with our smart forms. These tiny powerhouses only require a few fields for users to fill in, and data from a user’s activity provides the rest of the picture you need to provide the most relevant content and resources.

Mastering the Art of User Intent

Incorporating user intent for SEO into your marketing is an art form. It requires a deeper knowledge and understanding of how your customers tick and creating experiences that match what your customers need.

Hushly helps you collect the necessary data to identify incoming traffic intent and provides automation tools to customize visitor experiences. From personalized landing pages to custom content recommendations, there are many areas you can transform into a personalized experience.

Try our free demo to see how Hushly understands what your customers want.

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