Drive Traffic to Your Site Using Intentful Phrases

The Situation

You’re given a choice: take a phone call for your red roses business from five people who searched “flowers” or from one person who searched “buy red roses”. Seems pretty obvious, right? Right. You would want the call from the one person looking to buy red roses. Just like Golden Rule #15, which teaches us to Acquire High Quality Inbound Links, we want to focus on quality over quantity. In this case, more importantly, the intent of the searcher.

The five people looking for just “flowers” are lacking intent. What kind of flowers? What color flowers? What do they need the flowers for? Are they buying, learning about, or looking for pictures of flowers? The possibilities are quite endless. When it comes to search traffic, you want to make sure you are broad enough to capture a large portion of the available traffic, but specific enough that your searchers have intent related to your offer.

Based on your business, your intent phrases will vary. Some examples of intentful words/phrases if you were a hair salon:

• Buy hair salon gift card
• Get my hair done
• How do I make a hair salon appointment
• Local hair salon
• Phone number for hair salon

The Case Study

Below is a high-level breakdown of the steps taken to target these intentful phrases:

1. Identify the new phrase/term of intent.
2. Keyword research to make sure there is enough search volume.
3. Develop a content strategy for the phrase via:
   • Whitepapers
   • Email Marketing
   • Webinars
   • Solution Papers
   • Blog Posts
4. Create dedicated landing pages.
5. Develop paid search campaigns to send traffic to these landing pages and content pieces.
6. Use high quality inbound links with these intentful phrases as the anchor text (see Rule #15).

The Results

After implementing the above, we were able to increase clicks on RKON’s ads at less than half the cost of other IT terms – spreading out their budget and generating quality traffic that converted into leads. Also, the ads remained in the top two paid spots with high quality scores for the targeted intentful phrases.

It’s not just the traffic you send to your site – it’s how you target it and support it with valuable/optimized content. Intent leads to results when it comes to your targeting efforts. If you aren’t targeting with intent, you aren’t really targeting at all. Targeting without intent is like trying to boil water over a low flame. It may eventually happen, but it’s going to take a lot longer and more resources.

In the end, if you are using intentful phrases to send traffic to your site, you will almost assuredly see an uptick in conversions. Without intent, people seeking your products or services will have a difficult time wading through the sea of messaging they see online.