Understanding your audiences' search intent

Ranking for a keyword is not the goal. Matching the intent behind it is. Traffic that does not match intent bounces, and bounced traffic converts no one.

The four intents

Most queries fall into one of four buckets — informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. The content that wins is the content that answers the intent the searcher actually had.

Work backwards from the answer

Decide what a good outcome looks like for the searcher, build the page that delivers it, and let the keywords follow. SEO and content are one system, not two.