In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom connects search intent to the organic funnel and how this can help guide our keyword research.

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Happy Friday, Moz fans. Today, I want to talk a bit about search intent and how that relates to the organic SEO funnel today. So in traditional marketing, we have a funnel that looks a bit like this, where you start at sort of an awareness phase, and then you move down towards the conversion.

In organic marketing, we often talk about the same concepts, and we talk about sort of the intents that you work through on your way down. So I want to talk a little bit about what each of those intents looks like right now and how the challenges sort of and opportunities differ, which they do quite a lot for marketers in each of these phases. All of the data I'm going to talk about today is from a STAT whitepaper that we published earlier this year.

There's a huge amount. You'll notice there aren't any charts on this whiteboard; it would not have been possible for me to condense all of the data onto the whiteboard. So I'm going to talk about some of the key takeaways. And if you want to look at the information that has led me to those, then you can click — I'm sure there'll be a link somewhere below — and have a look at that.

So, starting at the top of the funnel, with informational search, this is people who are not necessarily even thinking anything to do with a conversion, not even at an early stage necessarily.

They just want information. They might be trying to answer a simple or complex question. Now, what we notice at this stage of the funnel, and you might have noticed this as well, is there's increasingly little space for traditional organic. Often, you'll get a big feature at the top, like a featured snippet or a knowledge graph, sort of custom results, and then directly beneath that, you'll get a "People Also Ask."

On a lot of screens, that's already the entire above-the-fold space. So this is the search intent with the lowest share of voice for organic of any of the intents I'm going to talk about today. It's 43.6% organic share of voice right now. Yeah, I'd say that's lower than any of the others.

Like I said, there's a few ways you can measure share of voice. We're obviously looking at volume and position on the SERPs or how dominant the organic is compared to other features. But however you cut it, this is a low number. So in terms of what you can look for if you are trying to play in this space, you can filter your keyword research to sort of look for informational intent plus position one organic because there are still some cases where that exists, or perhaps when there is a featured snippet, you can look at whether it's possible to actually win that featured snippet.

So, what you should be looking for in terms of honing in your keyword research here is sort of informational intent plus something organic appearing in position one, because there are still some cases where that happens. Also, obviously, I talk about featured snippets. Featured snippets are winnable. Whether you think that's worthwhile, I would suggest that is worthwhile if only for the impression.

I think, as SEOs, we often forget the value of impressions as opposed to clicks. But I would say it is worth trying to compete for these. But in some cases, you might have to make that equation in terms of whether the effort is going to be worthwhile because, of course, it's never guaranteed anyway.

Moving down the funnel, though, where I think there is a bit more traditional organic opportunity and activity, we get to commercial.

So, if you see keyword modifiers like "best," "compare," "top," "reviews," these are all a pretty good indicator that if a keyword or a key phrase contains one of these words, then it's going to be commercial or what we might call sort of consideration phase. What you tend to see here is very tough organic competition because there is so much opportunity.

So often, at the moment, you have Reddit and Amazon doing very well here. We've also seen a huge amount of Google updates specifically targeting this kind of intent of keyword. So think all the product review updates, all the helpful content updates, they disproportionately cause volatility for commercial rankings. So this can be quite, I don't know, a dangerous place to play in if you're looking for sort of reliability and certainty in your organic marketing.

But there are rich rewards. What I'd also look for here is winnable features. So look for commercial intent plus winnable features in your keyword research. So by winnable features, that might vary depending on the sector you're in. But, for example, things like image results or video results, you can appear.

They're not traditional organic results. You can appear. You can try and pop up there. So this can be a way around some of the tough competition in regular organic, although I do suggest that you try and beat there as well, obviously. Moving still further down the funnel, we sort of have a surprisingly different picture.

So, moving to transactional, we'll come to navigational in a second, but transactional is the bottom of a traditional funnel. This is people who are basically looking to immediately convert. And what's interesting is that that has a strong correlation with local searches and with local packs appearing in searches, which seems a little bit counterintuitive at first, but actually, if you think about it, it kind of makes sense.

There's a lot of products, a lot of verticals, a lot of buyer journeys where when you actually get to the point of making the conversion, you might not be doing that online. Not everything is e-commerce or lead generation. You might be looking for a tradesperson. You might be looking to go into a store and try it on or buy it. You might be looking for a restaurant, something like this.

So in all of these cases, there's actually an either implied or an explicit local aspect to your search. Also, for obvious reasons, perhaps, we see a lot of ads crowding out other features when you get this far down the funnel. But what's interesting in the organic results is that there's surprisingly low competition.

So the average Domain Authority in the top 10 for transactional is actually only 75. So for commercial, that would be significantly higher. That would be 82. So remember that Domain Authority is on a logarithmic scale.

So this is not like, oh, it's 10% harder or something like that to rank in commercial. This is a big difference to go from 75 to 82. So what that suggests is that there are organic opportunities here. Obviously, you are going to be appearing alongside those local packs. You are going to be appearing alongside ads. But I think people sometimes forget with local search, local search is not just local packs.

There are actually local organic results as well. They can be a big opportunity because, obviously, it's very high intent. You're working against potentially local competition, so less strong competition. And even though it's long tail, because of that high intent and that high chance to convert, it can definitely pay off.

Then lastly, and this is a little bit of an appendix in a way, so navigational, there's a lot of arguments about how navigational would fit into a traditional marketing funnel because, in a lot of ways, this is the post-conversion. This is I've already bought from you once, and now I want to buy from you again, or perhaps I'm so engaged with your brand that I want to read your content or recommend you to a friend, or something like this.

So I would say that this goes right to the bottom of a funnel if it goes anywhere. But what we see in the SERPs here is all the things that you would expect from a good branded SERP. So if I was giving you advice on how to control your branded SERPs, I would probably say make sure you not only dominate with your own domain or maybe domains, in some cases, but then you also control all of the other positions and features with your YouTube, your Instagram, your Twitter, and so on.

And this shows up not just in the domains that are ranking in organic, but also it shows up in the kind of features that appear. So you see things like Twitter carousels. You see things like video carousels. So these are all the kind of things that you would hope to control in your organic for your branded terms. So yeah, hopefully, this has given you some ideas to sort of hone in your keyword research for the different phases of the funnel or perhaps even figure out which parts of the funnel you actually want to focus on organic for versus maybe other channels filling in, in other areas.

Much more of this information, and the data behind it in that white paper I mentioned at the start. Thank you very much for watching.

Transcription by Speechpad.