Understanding What Your Customers Want Beyond Keywords - Weekly SEO with Neha Khanna #56

Speaker A: Sam?

Speaker B: Mhm. Foreign.

Speaker A: Welcome to the Weekly. This week I have Neha as my guest and she has an excellent presentation waiting for us. How are you, Neha?

Speaker B: I'm good, I'm good, thank you. Really excited to be here.

Speaker A: So where do you live? I guess you live it in the usa, right? It's a little bit, uh, far away from Turkey.

Speaker B: Yeah, quite far. But right now I am in India visiting, uh, my family after three years, so it's been nice. Um, I'm here for a month,

Speaker A: family visit. I'm all. I always wonder India and the food and the culture, but I've never had the opportunity to go there.

Speaker B: Oh, you should definitely come. It's, it's beautiful. And I live, uh, in the capital of India, Delhi. Um, great street food you'll find here, so.

Speaker A: Yeah, I know. And uh, for everyone, if you have any questions during the live stream, you can always ask them from the chat box. Uh, you're welcome to answer your questions and if you want, we can start in a few seconds. People will come later.

Speaker B: Sounds good.

Speaker A: Yep. And I really love your presentation, by the way. I'm so excited about it. I hope everyone like it. Uh, it's a really good and informative, uh, presentation. I hope, uh, everyone will find something from out of it. So we can start slowly if you want.

Speaker B: Awesome. I'm going to present my screen now. Thank you. Um, can you confirm if you can see my screen?

Speaker A: Yep, I added it.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: Um, it will come in a few seconds, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker B: All right, so, um, shall we start?

Speaker A: Yep. Uh, by the way, I'm gonna close my camera because of the Internet connection. Maybe it will help, uh, you to, uh, present your presentation a little bit easier. Uh, there may be a technical problem in Streamyard today because of the Internet. That's why, uh, if you can't hear us, just tell us. Okay?

Speaker B: Okay, thank you. All right. Um, I'm really excited to be here. Um, my name is Neha Khanna, and uh, I'm a technical product manager at Wayfair, based out of Boston, Massachusetts. Uh, I came to the States in 2018. I'm, um, originally from India. Uh, I've had diverse backgrounds, um, in my professional journey, working, um, as a software engineer, then a business analyst. I also wanted to, um, dig my hands on data science. So I pursued my master's at Drexel University in Philadelphia during 2018. Um, and I worked, um, as an intern, uh, as a data scientist intern, uh, at a startup where I loved, um, you know, working with machine learning models. Uh, but I really wanted to get back, uh, and find my way in product management. Um, and Wafer happened in 2021, which was a, uh, great time to um, jump into a company which had been growing exponentially after the pandemic. Uh, Wayfair sells online, um, furniture and home goods. Uh, and I am leading the product roadmap for SEO at Vfair. Um, so that's about me. Today I will be talking about search intents. Uh, I believe everyone in the SEO industry is familiar with what our search intents. But um, we often, uh, fail to understand our search intents through the customer lens. So it's very important to a understanding what your customers want. What is the intent of why they're coming to any search engine for that matter, or your website? Um, are they looking for something to buy or just something to explore, something inspirational? Um, and then once you do understand those intents behind every customer lens, you want to be able to optimize your content to target those search intents. Um, as a takeaway, in the end, um, my data packed, uh, slides are going to show you how you can actually rank on multiple positions using uh, these search intents. Um, but let me start with a very basic example of any user. Say, um, you're a customer who recently signed, uh, up on Disney and wanted to watch your favorite Disney classic movie called Aladdin. And um, you were so fascinated or impressed by Aladdin Magic Carpet, uh, or the Laadin rugs that you immediately wanted to buy it, um, after seeing that movie. And you go onto um, google.com or any, any search engine for that matter to search for Aladdin, uh, rugs. And you type in this keyword Aladdin rugs with an intent to buy. For those who are not familiar with, um, who is Aladdin, Uh, this is Aladdin who is, um, Prince, uh, who's trying to impress his princess on this magic carpet that he carries. Um, and it's a favorite, um, one of my favorites movie um, on Disney, uh, thanks to Snoop, uh, Dogg. Actually, uh, Aladdin rugs became very popular, uh, during Super Bowl 2022. Uh, and that's where I got my idea of snatching this. Aladdin carpets and magic carpets as a search term. But going back to search engine results. Right, Aladdin rugs is the keyword that you typed in. Let me see what your uh, search results actually have to offer you, um, for an intention to buy these drugs. And uh, just acknowledging, um, that these search engine results are based out of Boston, Massachusetts, because that's where I was doing these Searches, um, your organic results on top, uh, will give you, or Google provides you with Aladdin carpet Cleaners, um, and navigates you to one in New Hampshire. Now New Hampshire is like two and a half to three hours drive from Boston. Um, I don't know if I'm ready to just drive uh, to buy these rugs, uh, to New Hampshire. That's the first thought that came to my mind when I saw my first top result. The second one actually um, gets me to Sant Antonio, um, Aladdin Rug Gallery which sells unique antique rugs which yeah, could be interesting. And the third one here is actually Rug bank which is ranking on position three, uh, featuring a very custom design, uh, antique, um, brown rug. Well they definitely don't seem like Aladdin Drugs to me since Aladdin drugs are purple in color. Um, so just overall, let me take a step back as a customer. How am I feeling about the search engine results? Because even Google right now is trying to meet my intent. Can I say that all the search engine results and even though Google is trying hard to give you the best results, um, they may never be 100% accurate. I won't say they are not accurate at all, but like close to 100% is a good accuracy to get, but they may never achieve that. And what you might end up feeling, I don't know about you, but I might just end up feeling like this. Where can I get these results? I just had a simple intention to buy Aladdin rugs, um, and where can I get them? So this is where the concept of search intents, um, come into play. What is search intent? Search intent is the purpose of an online search. Any customer that is going online, uh, is coming with a, uh, purpose or intention to do something with that search term. Right? It is the reason why someone conducts a specific search in hope to find something. What are the different types? And this is just a refresher for many of uh, the SEO professionals today. But there are four types, right? Um, just in general high level. There could be more and there could be many more that, that could keep coming. But Google, um, uh, proposes these four high level search intent types that are informational, where someone is looking for a high level information, uh, very generic. And um, they want to either get educated on it or they want to find more um, things about it. They have a few questions about it. The second one is commercial, where the user is in the journey of finding an information, evaluating it, comparing it, but with an intention to buy eventually. So you might come with an intention of, you know, let me Evaluate some of these products online and then eventually buy it. Because I want to compare uh, the results first. So that's commercial for you. Transactional is straightforward that you have decided uh, to act and you're looking for something very, very specific and you know that, that you wanted to buy in my, in our case that drugs, uh, navigational where someone is looking for a specific website, they want to go at a specific website or go at a specific brand page, but they just want to take the help of the search eng, help them navigate and some examples. As I'm um, uh, constantly talking about search intents here, um, it's never on the plate to us that this search term or this keyword that the customer had put in on the search engine was of this search intent type. Right? This is where our journey starts to figure out to identify the keyword in the form of an intent. As an example, when a customer is looking for how to choose area rug for bedroom, it's very straightforward, a very one intent dominant keyword that he's just looking for some information, making it purely informational intent type, best area rugs. I want to evaluate what are the different brands of area rugs that are best. What are the most comfortable area rugs. So what that the user here has an intention to buy but is evaluating first, hence making it commercial. Another keyword buy area rugs is as straightforward that I have decided to buy area rugs and the search engine give me all the results where I can buy that navigational. This is a good example. Aladdin rugs was also not only transactional but also navigational because Google suggested uh, navigational, uh, site or uh, geolocation, uh, as a recommendation and wanted to propose that I could go to New Hampshire, um, to Aladdin Carpet Rugs to buy these rugs. Um, you've understood these keywords as different search intents, right? Um, but there could be cases where your keyword could not just be one intent dominant, um, keyword. Right? All the examples that we saw were very straightforward. Um, helped us understand what the customer is actually looking for. Right? But it's also important to look at other examples in your pool, uh, and understanding the search intents by those keywords that may not be this straightforward and then eventually optimizing your content to actually target those search intents. Let's take another example, area rugs. And as obsessed I am with rugs because Wayfair loves rugs, I'm going to continue talking about rugs in my examples and the slides today. ADA rugs is just a keyword that you um, found. Um, right. Whether through Google or any other source that you're capturing your keywords from, um, as a first step of keyword research. Right. And uh, just by looking at this area rugs as a keyword, what is the first intent that would come to your mind? And that's where we want to get to the first step. Intent. Guessing is actually gambling. So this is where I'm going to take you step by step on how to navigate and understand that search intent for area rugs as a keyword. Step one, we have to analyze the search engine results page for the keyword area rugs. 200,000 people on an average monthly search volume are looking for area rugs. How on earth am I going to understand what these 200,000 people want when they type area rugs? Step one, I want to understand what is Google suggesting for this keyword area rugs. What are my top organic results as they seem like VFair, Home Depot, Target? All these companies sell rugs or area rugs and they're actually ranking on the top three making it purely transactional results. They want the customers to come and buy from these websites, um, and are actually selling one. The second half of the search engine results page is actually very interesting because it's a mix of commercial and informational. If you see you'll find find the perfect rug or how to choose the best area rug by Lowe's. Or there's also a reviews article that is ranking 4, uh and 5 on page one itself for area rugs that says 16 best area rugs of 2022. So if you understand this, even Google is trying to match up the intent or the different kind of intents behind area rugs for all types of customers within people Also ask. It's also interesting that people are also wondering what is a nice size area rug for living room or where can I get a good quality rug for cheap when they are. When they just type area rugs. Understanding or analyzing the search engine results page here, I want to call out that 7 on 10 out of these rankings were purely transactional results. Where this is a listing page that they are ranking on page one for area rugs while three on ten or the remaining one are purely informational slash commercial that you could call it proposing that the customer could find their answers for area rugs by looking at these articles. I've understood search intents. I've analyzed my um, search engine results page. What next? I want to be able to map these keywords to their right search intents. And what do we mean by mapping? You've identified your search and results page is distributed out of different intent types. Area rugs is not purely transactional today. It is transactional and informational. And looking at the page itself, you can I say it's 70% transactional and 30% informational. So now just look through the lens of intent and not keyword your area rug informational and area rug transactional. This is where I'm calling out the mapping third step. You've identified your search intents for that keyword. Now you want to be able to conceptualize the content by targeting these two different search intents. Voila. Um, Wafer was able to create and target area rugs informational by creating a right guide how to choose the right rug size for people looking for just area rugs because we understood that they're looking for this information right on about the sizes. And B, we also have a listings page or a browse page where people can browse on different kind of area rugs that Wayfair sells. There are also other tools here that can tell you the intent of that keyword. Semrush is actually one of them. Calling out informational, navigational, commercial and transactional keywords in your pool that stand today. There's actually also search metrics within the keyboard performance dashboard that you'll see there's a search intent guide or a report that will spit out all the keywords that are informational, navigational or transactional. And these are not only one on one. These are, uh, distribution. So a keyword could be 70% transactional, 30% informational, just how we saw in the example of area rugs. Or it could be 30% informational, 70% transactional, um, or just evenly distributed on all the three intents. But say I don't want to use any of these tools because I want to be able to figure out on my own, um, because I'm from a different business altogether, I'm not from E commerce, I sell something completely different or a software or I provide a service. I want to be able to understand these common phrases that come on the search engine results page for my business. So, for example, you might want to scrape and analyze the search engine results page for that keyword and identify these phrases if they come onto the page. One to be able to map your keyword to the right intent type. For example, if the search engine results, um, give out rankings or top 10 rankings are including phrases like what or why, tutorial or example or tag tips, uh, these are purely informational keywords, uh, while commercial is where your, your customer is actually evaluating. So the, the top 10 results are purely on best or reviews or comparisons, making it purely commercial. And then same goes with transactional navigational. This is a great way to be able to um, bring up your own dictionary of common phrases that you want to map to the intent type by analyzing the search engine results. Now let's stop here, um, and move our gears towards what will happen if these search intents will change on the search engine results page. Obviously Google is not going to give out the same results. Um, it's going to understand the technical SEOs behind each of the links or um, the rankings behind um, each of those answers that uh, these companies are trying to answer but uh, they're not going to be the same always. Right. Um, the intent will also shift and Google will also trying to match these intent shifts to address all the answers to the customers that are actually coming onto Google for in a hope to find something. Let's take one example, right? You have Google algorithms or updates or reviews coming up that actually makes so many changes. In fact Google makes changes almost every day whether it's on their features, whether it's on their um, prioritizing um, an informational guide on top of the transactional, um, any, any review, product review updates. It's, it's making so many changes altogether. How do you keep up with just analyzing the search engine results on a regular basis? As an example of an intent type shift I want to give out here is bulletproof coffee. Now for people who do not know what bulletproof coffee is, uh, it's actually around um, this was a buzzword around the keto diet that became popular uh a couple of years ago where people started consuming ah, high fat uh food um, and carbohydrates um, and in order to maintain a healthy diet, um, and as and when they understood keto diet could be also consumed in form of any other liquids, bulletproof coffee um, started taking um, um, popular or started becoming popular. And around the same time where keto was just becoming a thing and people were still getting familiar with it, uh, the search results on bulletproof coffee were like what is bulletproof coffee? But because people still very new to the keto diet, what, how, how do we make this coffee and what is this coffee all about? So what is bulletproof coffee would rank number one or number two in the positions around the time where that the keto or bulletproof was still new but as people became familiar with it right that their years passed or months Passed. And then people started understanding the bulletproof coffee has so and so recipes or so and so ingredients. And the consumption of this coffee got so high that eventually people started seeing adverse effects or adverse consequences. And when they did that, a lot of the intense shift even among the people came into play. Where now bulletproof coffee was, uh, ranking for Is bulletproof coffee good for health? Three potential downsides. Do you. Should you drink one? What is the recipe? How can I make it so see how the intent change from understanding what is this all about to is this even good? So this is the intent type shift that we are considering. Initially it was all about finding some information and now it was all about evaluating something. But this is where you can actually take a lead. Or you could take this as an advantage to your own company or your phone. What if I told you today you could actually rank twice on the search engine results just by taking this advantage of the intent type shift? Interesting question. Let's find the answer. But let me stop here. We are not talking about creating duplicate pages to be able to rank twice or more. No, I'm not talking about creating multiple pages and exposing it to Google. So Google can crawl them up and rank the different pages that you've created and try to be on different spots. Google is never going to do that. So what do you mean by that? Well, what I meant is you want to be able to create content by targeting not the keywords, but the intent types and the multiple intent types that actually sit behind every keyword. I am going to get there. I'm sure all of you are still wondering where and how can we rank twice. Let me take another example. I love area rugs, like I have mentioned a zillion times before. So living room area rugs is another example that I'm going to flush out and just put it on google.com now, just by looking at living room area rugs as a standalone keyword, I want to understand the intent behind it. What a user might be looking for when they typed in living room era rugs. Are they looking for different sizes of these rugs? Are they looking for colors? Are they looking where can I buy from them? Um, particularly in my case, I might be looking for, you know, if area rugs in my living room are going to make my space smaller or bigger? I don't know. There could be different intents behind this keyword. Remember the three steps. Let's go one by one on them. Step one, you want to analyze the search engine results page you. I want to identify the different Kind of or uh, different types of search results that appear on page one or more for living room area rugs. Look at this wafer is actually ranking twice one on a guide on position three and at the bottom for a transactional page where we are actually selling, uh, these area rugs. But let me go to step two. I want to be able to map this keyword with its right intent. I've understood that 75% of these results are transactional. That means they are browse pages or listing pages that are trying to sell area rugs. But 25% of those are also informational, wherein you have a guide put together for just living room area rugs. Step three, you create the content to now understand the right intent and target the right intent. We have a, uh, guides page for living room area rugs that states out the best living room area rugs and how to choose the perfect area rug for that. And also another transactional page that gives out different listings of um, area rugs like I mentioned earlier for the customers who are just looking to buy living room area rugs. Another example is large living room rugs, where Wayfair was also able to rank twice, um, number one and number three for both transactional and informational intent. And a page, uh, because we wanted to understand every intent behind large living room rugs and to be able to expose it to Google where Google is also trying to match that intent for this keyword. And along with transactional, when we also started targeting or capturing informational pages, our impressions immediately went up and 10% increase in the impressions that we've seen out of targeting these intent types. Uh, that led us uh, to a 10% increase in impressions and 7% increase in clicks purely on informational. And there are also top areas that we are ranking twice on. For example living room rugs or rugs for living room rug for living room or living room carpet, and so on and so forth by two spots. Um, I know, um, we have been talking a lot about just rugs. I also wanted to put out another example. Big, uh, desk. Yes, I am over with just rugs, but we also sell desks. Big desk is one example. In traditional SEO you would think that the customer is only looking to buy, uh, the big desk. But actually the customer is also looking to find the best desk size for um, his workspace. This is the article that we published that started ranking, um, number four. Uh, it's actually within people also ask section. So purely informational. Now do you see that you also um, people are also wondering what are the different desk sizes or how can I make my desk bigger just by typing this keyword called big desk. So that's why again, going back to the step one, it's very important to understand what your search engine results are also spitting out for this keyword to be able to understand the intent better. Now, just by targeting different kind of intents, we were able to see improvements in our ranking, our keyword ranking by 60% due to publishing new net new content articles since last year because we started taking coverage on different kind of intents. And well, we are not the only ones who are targeting ah, different intents. Uh, our competitor Lowe's, a big shout out to them. They're also ranking twice for a keyword, pendant lights, uh, and I'm sure many more. But they have put together an informational guide, uh, on pendant lighting, buying guide and a transactional page just listing out different pendant lights, uh, that they sell. Home Depot is also another example. And the example that I have here is of lampshades. Who would have thought that people looking for lampshades are also looking for different types of lampshades. They want to get more educated about the different types and kinds along with just buying lampshades. So these are the two results on the same page for lampshades. As I, um, come to the end of the presentation, these are my high level key takeaways that um, you want to be able to source the right keyword which is relevant to your firm or business or area of expertise. Then you want to be able to analyze the search engine results and identify the intent type behind those relevant keywords that you've captured. And c, you want to be able to optimize your content by targeting not the keyword. But now the different intent types that you've identified show Google that your, your content is actually fresh by updating your old content. Because remember we talked about the search intent shift. And also don't forget to target new intents. There could be different new sub intents within an intent. Right. So don't forget to also um, get to that layer and that level of granularity. But.

Speaker A: By the way, it was an excellent presentation. Thank you so much. Every, everyone should watch it later and study about it. Um, I really love the topic and in Turkey sometimes we are trying to do this but all of the uh, potential clients say that no, we don't want to create uh, a budget for this. We already have a page ranking for it. But they're actually missing a lot of opportunities here and we're trying to Persuade them. But this is a really good, uh, example to persuade, I guess, the people. It's a really good case study material. Thank you so much. And I have a question for you. Uh, scraping the search results may be a little bit hard for, uh, new beginners in the SEO industry. Do you have any suggestions for that? That they can use tools, free tools maybe?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, there could be some online, um, tools that we could use to understand the different intent types. And um, I'm sure there are open source tools out there that you could possibly use. Um, the two examples that I gave Semrush and Search Metrics are also the two tools that are also readily available to give out the search intent type that you could try and you could actually just try with, um, trial version to start with to see how that works for you, um, as a new beginner. But, um, I believe that that'll be a good start there.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, thank you. And, um, I'm also using SEO Minion. I'm trying to use SEO Minion to its huge potential because, because they're also good at, you know, uh, scraping. People also ask results and other results. But Semrush, yeah, you can also do that with the trial account. And thank you for your answer. Uh, anyone, any questions from the listeners? One final question for Neil. I guess everyone is vibing because it's Friday. Thank you so much for everything. This was a really good presentation and uh, you may be able to watch it after the, uh, live stream. And I'm also gonna create, uh, a recap article for it on Boustras Blue. You can also read from there too, together with the video. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I, uh, think it's, it was a great opportunity for me as well to refresh the importance of search intense to myself. Uh, but no, I was really excited to be here and thank you so much again.

Speaker A: Um, and have a nice weekend for everyone. I hope you, you are happy and bye. Bye. Bye.

Speaker B: Have a nice weekend.