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The internet is a crowded sphere, and there aren’t many industries where you will find it easy to build an audience without intense competition from rival businesses.
Today, it’s more important than ever before to understand just what your prospective customers are thinking, and what they need.
Moreover, you need to understand how they are searching.
That all boils down to user intent.
What many marketers don’t realize is that the cornerstone of PPC (pay-per-click) advertising success is all about matching your keywords with the user’s intent.
If you’re not doing this yet, it could be costing you.
One of the first steps to understanding how customers think is to discover the right keywords. Aligning your campaign with keyword intent in mind will help you get more clicks, and also allow you to create more relevant, persuasive ads and landing pages.
In order to deliver content that is closely aligned with the needs and interests of your target audience, you must put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
Let’s explore three ways you may be losing out on money by ignoring user intent, and show you how to remedy the situation.
During campaign creation, we usually focus on generic keywords first, before getting more specific as we learn more about our target audience. The problem here is that the generic search terms rarely have much to do with user intent.
Without that knowledge, it’s difficult to structure your landing page or ad in a way that speaks to your leads.
Many companies don’t pay any attention to keywords in relation to user intent, nor do they consider what stage people are at in the buyer’s journey. If you do this, your ads will be broad, catch-all pitches that don’t speak to anybody in particular.
Imagine you are trying to optimize one of your client’s accounts, and you start off with some research to find that a lot of people have been using the search term, “wedding San Diego”. After a little digging, you discover that most people are searching for a list of wedding venues in the San Diego area.
With this insight, you create a new ad that is tailored for this segment of the audience. Suddenly, this targeted ad generates a 300% boost in click-through rate (CTR), and it also slashes the advertising costs by 54% for your client.
Isn’t that much better than guessing with generic terms?
Here’s what to do.
If you want to find more keywords that are aligned with user intent, the Keyword Planner in Google Ads is a great place to start.
With the generic term as your head term, you can view the keywords that have the highest search volume, and also check any additional words that users are adding to the head term.
Generally speaking, long-tail keywords are used by people who are further along the buyer’s journey, and so it is safe to assume that people using those keywords are more likely to purchase something soon.
For example, let’s say you are selling sports footwear. When you are doing keyword research, you find the following keywords:
By gauging the stage of the buyer’s journey that the user is at, you can organize your keywords from low-intent keywords to high-intent keywords.
This can usually be split into three distinct groups:
Start off with the ‘buy mode’ keywords to maximize the return on your marketing spend. This puts the focus on high-converting customers first.
The ‘scent of user intent’ is the relationship between keywords, ads and landing pages. There must be a consistent thread that runs from one to the next, otherwise, you risk losing leads.
This is a common mistake in PPC advertising, and it can happen even after you identify high-value keywords that your prospects are using.
A persuasive ad that attracts clicks is great, but if you don’t follow up with an optimized landing page, your campaign is a veritable excitement killer, which will deliver a ‘hit and miss’ conversion rate at best.
This one is easier than you think. When you do thorough keyword research and group your keywords as we mentioned earlier, you’ll end up with three groups:
From here, you can create separate ads and landing pages for each group. This way, you can target the search terms of each group, and also craft your copy and messaging with user intent in mind.
Your call-to-action (CTA) is the final punchline that encourages viewers to get on board with whatever it is you are offering.
In paid advertising, CTAs can either make you a lot of money or drain your wallet. Here are three ways they could be costing you:
Your CTA should give your landing page added focus, and also allow you to measure performance. In PPC advertising, it’s important that the messages in your ads and landing pages are aligned, not only with each other but also with user intent.
Make sure everything is consistent, and keep the high-intent keywords in mind when writing your copy.
When it comes to PPC advertising, there is little to be gained from guesswork.
Knowing the search terms that people use and the questions they ask can make a huge impact on your marketing success. On the other hand, ignoring user intent and flying blind can cost you big time.
It’s time to leave your pride at the door, and embrace digital marketing analytics, and all its advantages.
By using keyword segmentation, and the higher levels of consistency and personalization that it enables, your ads will be much more targeted, and much more successful. That way, you’ll be giving people exactly what they are looking for.
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