Lately, there has been a lot of talk about how important knowing your audience is. If you know who they are and what they are interested in, you can serve them ads that are more relevant and effective. If you want to step up this and make your content even more optimized for them then you should take a look at understanding user intent!
In simple terms, this is the reason behind their search query or online behavior. The more you know about how and what they search for, the better you can target them and give them the results they want. If you manage to get good at this, you will know exactly what kind of content your users want and expect, and that makes it easier for it to rank better on their feeds and easier for them to convert.
But to find out what their intent is, you need to know what types of user intent there are, and how to best identify it amongst your audience!
Types Of User Intent
As mentioned, user intent is the purpose behind their search. Most sources say that there are up to five different ones, informational navigational, commercial, navigational, and local. These types of intent all signal to something else, but you can even shorten this list and only mention the main ones, which are informational, navigational, and transactional!
-
Informational Intent
This intent happens when users are searching for specific information or answers. These are usually a great indicator that the audience with this kind of intent is showing interest in a product category or service.
Some examples could be:
- Best Exercises for weight loss
- How to Find Good deals on Car insurance
- What online courses bring the most money
Targeting this intent is relatively simple. Depending on your niche, find what the most common search queries are, and determine what potential users of your products and services could be searching for.
Once you have a rough idea, create blog posts, guides, tutorials, and other kinds of content that target these keywords. If you do this right, people who search for things related to your niche will be brought to your content, where you can hopefully engage them enough for them to convert!
-
Navigational Intent
This user intent focuses on finding specific websites or brands that promote certain products or services. These are a bit harder to rank and optimize for, as affiliates usually don’t have a strong brand presence.
An example could be:
- iPhone Apple Store
- State Farm Car Insurance
This will mostly be populated by popular brands and bigger affiliates. But just because it's hard, doesn't mean you shouldn't try! Make sure your content is well-optimized and includes branded keywords that can help your users find you more easily.
-
Transactional Intent
Transactional intent is usually considered the most valuable one, as users who search for this are already ready to buy something and convert. This is where you will find the most competition, but also where you can get the most profit.
- Buy protein powder online
- Best deals on laptops
- Affordable Car Insurance offers
Targeting this intent can be done through product reviews, comparison articles, and good CTAs.
A single query doesn’t have to only have one intent as its main one, it could have multiple ones. This is what makes focusing on intent sometimes difficult and more an art form than science. Try having a content strategy that is flexible so that it can fit into multiple intents at once so that you get the biggest chance of success!
Why Does Intent Matter In Affiliate Marketing?
If you find the right intent and manage to optimize for it, you can improve your targeting dramatically. If you do everything properly, you can expect to boost your conversion rates by attracting users who are likely to click on your links and make purchases.
To rank for specific intents, you will also need to work on your SEO, which is a good thing on its own. Optimizing for specific intents means that your SEO will also improve, and through this, you will rank higher in general for various queries and keywords.
If these two things aren't enough, you will also be providing your users with a better user experience. This will improve their trust in your content and improve your reputation, helping you make more sales and keep users engaged for longer!
How To Identify User Intent
Now that you know what intent is, and why it's important, it's time to learn how to identify it!
-
Analyze Search Queries
We said how intent is basically what people search for, so this is where you should start if you want to identify it! You can use tools like Google Keyword Planer, Ahrefs, or any of the various paid and free options online.
Try finding what keywords and queries are the most common for your niche and see which type of intent they are. Once you have that, you will know how to best approach them.
-
Study Competitor Content
Your competition can often be helpful, especially when you want to research things that they rank highly for! Once you have some target keywords from step #1, find what content ranks the highest for that content. Likely, it will be content from your competition.
Take note of how they address user intent, what their headlines are, what the structure of their content is, what CTAs they use, how many images they have, how have they split up their content, and anything else you can find out.
Use all of this info to create a structure for the ideal content for that intent and keyword. Try creating content that matches most of these things, and try doing it just a bit better than they do. Hopefully, this will be enough for you to improve your rankings enough to get slightly ahead of them!
-
Review Analytics Data
Once you already have some content up, see what the stats say. Analyze different aspects of the page, what the engagement is, what the bounce rate is, what your users like and what they don’t and make changes based on that info.
Do this all the time, and try to perfect your content as much as you can and you will see how much your SEO improves and how you steadily gain more organic traffic through your rankings!
How To Improve Affiliate Conversions
So with all of this covered, here is how you should improve your affiliate conversions step by step through user intent!
- Start with keyword research. Using the tools at your disposal, find the right keywords and how to best rank for them. Learn what your audience is searching for and what kind of content those keywords usually lead to.
- Match content to the intent. Now that you know what you need to have to rank higher, create content that is tailored to the user's needs! Analyze what your competition is doing, and try upping their content so that you rank higher and have better quality content!
- Use clear CTAs! Try capturing your audience with clear calls to action that make them react and become more actionable. Learn what others use and how audiences react to those CTAs and implement them into your content as well! Make sure to use them sparingly, but when you do, make them effective!
- Test and optimize. Testing is what sets average affiliates apart from the pros. If you want to make it big, you will need to test it all the time and optimize your content as you go forward. See what your audiences like, and what they don’t, do A/B testing, and improve every aspect as much as you can!
Conclusion
Understanding user intent is a big part of making successful campaigns. Learning what your audience wants and adapting your content to that can help you build trust, improve engagement, and drive conversions.
A good thing about optimizing for it also means you optimize a lot of things you would do regulatory for SEO, so it's an all-around good thing to do! Just make sure you don’t overdo things and always keep on improving your content so that it stays relevant and engaging to customers!
Do you utilize user intent in your campaigns? How has it changed your performance in the long run? Share your experience with us in the comments below!