3 Types of Search Intents & What They Mean for Cannabis Companies
At its core, SEO is the strategy or practice to get more traffic to your website by increasing your organic search engine ranking. While the end goal is always to increase sales, there are a number of steps and stages that must be addressed before then.
One of the ways to create a strong SEO strategy is to take into consideration the search intent of the keywords you’re optimizing for.
What is Search Intent?
Yoast define search intent as “the purpose of an online search… the reason why someone conducts a specific search”. It can also be called user intent or audience intent.
Search intent is the driving reason behind what a user is searching for. Are they ready to make a purchase or are they looking for all of their options? Creating the right content for each search intent is crucial to increasing sales and converting new customers.
There are 3 kinds of search intents, and they each align with a stage of the buyer’s journey.
The Buyer’s Journey
Hubspot defines the buyer’s journey as “the process buyers go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.”
Awareness phase
Here, the user realizes they have a problem. In this stage, they’ll decide how big of a priority solving this problem is to them. With research, they’ll look into how common this problem is, if other people have their problem and potentially how they solved it.
2. Consideration phase
This is the research heavy phase of the buyer’s journey. In this stage, the user defines their problem and the options they have to solve it. They’ve decided that this problem is a priority to solve and they’re committed to finding a solution.
3. Decision-making phase
The user chooses a solution and spends money to fix their problem. This is the stage that every business gets hung up on- the money stage. But if you don’t cater to buyers at every stage of their journey, they have less incentive to choose you at the end.
Types of Search Intent
Understanding the search intent of users is important because it allows you to create content for every stage of the buyer’s journey. When brands focus on awareness rather than just conversions, it actually increases their ultimate conversions because they’re providing value to the audience at every stage of the journey, not just asking for the sale.
Informational intent
Looking for an answer to a question.
A lot of searches are done with informational intent. The user has a specific question or topic they want more information one. Informational searches typically occur during the awareness phase of the buyer’s journey.
You can use Google’s algorithm to your advantage here. When someone is searching for rolling papers, they’re not necessarily looking for the history of rolling papers, they want to know where to buy them and how to use them. For some search terms like “how to roll a joint”, images and YouTube videos are handy.
Key terms can include:
information
how to
best way to
why/ why do
what does
Navigational Intent
Finding a specific company or brand
Users with a navigation intent are looking for a specific website, brand or product. Navigational intent often occurs during the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey, as a user is digger deeper into specific options to solve their problem.
This intent is tricky because even if you have what the user is looking for, ranking well for a term with navigational intent is only beneficial to your organic traffic if yours is the site people are looking for. If you rank well for “raw rolling papers” but you don’t sell them it likely won’t help your traffic.
Transactional Intent
Looking to buy
When users search wit a transactional intent, they’re ready to spend money. A transactional search intent begets a transaction. A transaction search intent takes place in the decision-making phase of the buyer’s journey. This is quite literally, the money shot.
Key Terms
buy
deal
Pricing
discount
product names
Yoast identifies a 4th type of search intent, called commercial investigation. When a user searches with this intent, they’re looking to buy in the future and want to do research to make their decision. This is not a different kind of search intent- this is just informational intent with a different name.
Why Search Intent Matters for Cannabis Brands
Knowing the intent behind search terms and where the users are in their buyer’s journey is crucial for creating valuable content that keeps your company top of mind through the entire process. As a cannabis brand, education is paramount to converting nervous first-time users into dedicated and loyal customers. If your content is only centered around conversations or transactional search intents, you’re losing out on a large potential client base that simply needs nurturing.
Looking at the search results page for a term is a great way to get an understanding of the search intent and the current resources Google is providing to users. This can be a great way to identify content gaps and build out your blog strategy to fill them and increase your ranking.
