
Search behaviour targeting in SEO is the difference between:
- An organic search footprint that is too narrow, and therefore inadequate to feed the lead generation needs of the business, and
- Visitor traffic quality that is too generic to meet the prequalification needs of your marketing and sales team.
Before jumping into what search behaviour targeting is, let’s look at a few supporting definitions.
Traffic Quality V Traffic Generation
A common misconception in SEO is that SEO is about traffic generation. It’s actually about traffic targeting, and very often, that does not present as traffic growth. The idea here is that you are better off having 100 visitors to your website when 10 convert, than you are with 1,000 visitors when 5 convert.
It’s about traffic quality because that’s the prerequisite for lead generation or eCommerce transactions. Indeed, to generate a lead from your website, your visitor must first be in the market or have some level of interest in what you sell. That’s traffic quality.
The search engines are unique in this respect in that, whether paid or organic, you are in control as to which searches you want to compete for and which you don’t.
SEO V Email
While email is more personalised, good SEO means being there when your prospective customer is ready to buy or become a sales lead. This contrasts with email marketing where you fire off a marketing email-shot, hoping that someone is ready to buy or engage.
What is SEO Visitor Prequalification?
It’s when a searcher self-qualifies as a potential sales lead based on the structure and vocabulary of the words they used in their search query. Alternatively phrased, it’s when the searcher’s intent is aligned to the sales goals of your business.
What is Semantic Alignment of Content?
Very simply, “semantic alignment” means that your blog post or page content satisfies the searcher’s intent which drove the search in the first place. So this means that, before you “put pen to paper” or prompt an AI such as ChatGPT to write content for you, it is more important to understand or identify the “intent” of the search you are trying to target rather than just a few keywords scattered here and there that are a subset of the intent.
Consider this – a single “search intent” may be articulated in hundreds or even thousands of different ways using multiple language variations and contexts. Yet the search intent remains the same.
So it is true to say that targeting individual keywords equates to a very small slither of the whole cake! And yet, so many search optimised websites are still doing this.
A Different Approach
Let’s put a name on targeting search intent – let’s call it “search behaviour” targeting. We define search behaviour as the collective language vocabulary that makes up all variations of a defined search intent. So by “search behaviour”, we refer to the many searches that your target audience / personas make that pre-qualifies that audience as a potential lead.
Search intent can be narrowly defined or more widely defined. The narrower its definition, the more conducive it is to create content that is semantically aligned to it.
In Conclusion: Search Behaviour Targeting is not Keyword Research
Few would argue that modern SEO is about aligning a website’s content to search intent. Yet all of the research tools out there still focus on “keywords”. No wonder so many SEO initiatives are still keyword-centred and missing so much of their potential search engine footprint.
The closest nod that SEO toolkits give to search intent in the tagging of keyword searches as either having a transactional, commercial, informational or navigational intent. This is certainly of use, but comes nowhere close to helping you to define the language around a given intent.
While there is a process-based approach to search behaviour research that is effective, it is not possible to cover it in a blog post. For now, think of the starting point of your search behaviour research as acquiring an understanding of your target persona’s pain points and build your vocabulary around those.
When you’ve conducted your traditional keyword research, group your outcomes by intent – then revisit for alternative phraseology within that intent. That will provide a decent basis from which to identify the right type of content that is intent-aligned and which speaks to the pain points of the Post’s intended audience.