International SEO involves optimizing your website for different regions and languages in order to ensure that it ranks well in Google Search worldwide. This strategy is essential for businesses…
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Every business owner with a website is looking for ways to get noticed in the search results. There are loads of tactics to rank well as a local business, but unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. As with most things SEO, this is a combined effort. One of the ways to get noticed is by offering customers up-to-date information like opening hours and contact information. You can do this using Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business. But what is it exactly, and why is it so important for local SEO?
Before we start, it’s good to know that Google recently changed its name from Google My Business to Google Business Profile. But even with its new name, Google Business Profile is still your one-stop shop for managing your business information and how it will be presented in the search results. It is an essential tool to adjust how your business is shown in Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph, and organic search results. According to the most recent edition of Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, Google My Business remains the biggest driver of local SEO success, with reviews coming in second place.
You can manage your business listing by adding NAP details, opening hours, photos, etcetera. There are even unique options to show multiple ways to shop (delivery or curbside pickup). In addition, you get many other options, like managing the reviews your customers leave behind. As you might already know, reviews should be a critical part of your local SEO efforts.
Want to learn more about local SEO and how to get higher rankings in the local search results? Our Local SEO training helps you improve your online presence and attract more online and offline visitors.
Getting started with Google Business Profile is easy; you make an account and claim your business. After filling in your details, you need to verify your business. You can choose between receiving an automated call or text with a verification code, or receiving a real-life postcard from Google at your specified address with the verification code. Some businesses may need to verify with a video. You may have to verify with more than one method. So, why does Google want you to verify your account? They want to ensure that you’re telling the truth and that you’re the business owner listed at the address. Google has a special page that helps you check your verification status.
Once verified, you can fill in all the necessary details and check how your listing is doing. You can get regular insights to see how many impressions, clicks, and subscribers your listing got over time. It’s a great way of getting a feel for how Google and customers perceive your business.
Keep in mind that Google My Business (or Google Business Profile) is not the catch-all tool for your local SEO. It has to work in tandem with your other off-page and on-page SEO efforts. You probably won’t climb the charts if your profile is inaccurate, but you won’t reach the top without a well-optimized site and localized content. These things go hand in hand.
Google Business Profile uses many factors to determine rankings for businesses. We’ll highlight the three most important ones:
Relevance determines how well your business fits the search intent of the customer. Is your focus identical to what the customer needs, or are you a bit opaque about what your company does? Vagueness doesn’t rank or sell. Be as clear as you can be, and keep your focus. That way, Google knows what people can expect from you and will be more inclined to show your business in the search results.
Tip: When setting up your profile, Google offers you common services that you can add to your category of business. It’s smart to include these, because they will help your business get found. We’ll talk about these in more detail later on.
Proximity is a well-known factor for ranking local businesses. And quite logical when you think about it. You can’t rank in a local search for dentist in Philadelphia when you have located your company in Manhattan. However, the exact way Google determines which businesses to show in a local search is unknown, and it can be pretty hard to rank in a given area. Other factors play a significant role as well. It helps to say you are located in a particular area and show it by having local-oriented content around your business on your site. Google uses what’s known about the searcher’s location to present the most relevant local businesses.
Prominence is all about the activity around your listing; this could be the number of reviews, events, local content, et cetera. It also helps to have loads of quality links to your site. It is somewhat hard to determine what prominence means exactly, but one thing is for sure: no one likes inactive profiles. You have to keep it updated with new photos and manage your reviews. As said before, this goes hand in hand with your site, so make sure both listings align and publish content focusing on your local area(s).
Any business with a bona fide brick-and-mortar location or an online outlet is eligible for a Google Business listing. But what if you operate your business out of your house and don’t want people to know your address?
If you don’t operate a walk-up brick-and-mortar location but visit your customers in a particular geographic area, you’re called a “Service Business.” Service businesses include plumbers, carpet cleaners, and courier services. In this case, you’re still eligible for a listing. However, you’ll want to choose “Service business” when Google asks what kind of business you have.
Google tries to make sure that only legitimate businesses are represented in GMB. It requires anyone claiming a Listing to verify their association with the company. The easiest way to start the process is to perform a desktop search on Google for your business name (for example, “Kido Chicago”). You’ll see a link in the panel on the right-hand side of the page that asks, “Own this business?”
Before you click that link to begin the verification process, make sure you are either not signed in to Google (you can create an account in the next step) or are signed into a Google account for your business instead of your personal Gmail. It’s not a requirement; however, sharing access to your listing with employees or other company agents from a business account will be much easier.
Once you fill out the most basic information (see below for what these details are), if it can corroborate your address and phone number, Google will call and ask you to enter a PIN on the screen. If it hasn’t previously seen a business with the phone number and address you submitted, you’ll be mailed a postcard within a week with instructions on how to PIN verify.
Some businesses may need to verify with a video. If you own a physical store, you will need to record your location by showing street signs, your business exterior and interior, and you need to show that you’re authorized to represent this business. You will need to show all these requirements in one continuous recording, so no editing.
If you own a service business, like a plumbing or landscaping business, you don’t have a physical store. That’s why you’ll need to show street signs or the surrounding area where your business is located, your business card or a branded vehicle or business tools, and finally a proof of address. Again, this needs to be done in one continuous recording.
This sounds simple, but it’s surprising how many business owners overthink these core attributes or try to “optimize” them. Your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) are your thumbprint online. If they don’t reflect your business accurately in your Google Business Profile, Google—and your customers—lose trust that you are who you say you are. They will stop sending business your way.
From a rankings standpoint, the business category is the most important attribute you can optimize in your Google Business Profile. In our experience, it’s best to keep an eye on Google’s advice on categories. Remember that advice has changed frequently over the years and might change again.
Google maintains a taxonomy of several thousand categories to describe local businesses. You’ll probably find a match pretty closely by typing in a few characters of a keyword that describes your business.
Google suggests “using as few categories as possible,” as well as categories that are “as specific as possible.” And while it’s true that Google can and does “detect category information from your website and mentions about your business throughout the web,” our advice is to specify as many relevant categories as possible on your Google Business Profile listing.
Google’s automated review system may remove one or two from your listing, but this is not spam—provided you select relevant categories. It helps you show up for as broad a range of searches as possible.
In the process, there’s a field to add your website URL, but it doesn’t have to be your “website” per se. In particular, if you operate in more than one location, you may want to enter the page on your website corresponding to the location you’re submitting to Google—rather than your homepage. Opinions are mixed on whether listing your homepage, or a location page will help you rank better, so do what’s best for prospective customers. If you think your homepage will give them the best initial sense of your business, submit it as your “website”. If a location page—or even some other page—will give your audience a better sense, submit that instead.
Later on, you can add a business description to your profile. It’s essential to take a moment and find an excellent way to describe your business on Google. The business description field gives you a maximum of 750 characters to convince people to visit your business. This might be the first thing people read about your business, so make it unique and exciting. Describe what your business offers precisely and how you set yourself apart from your competitors. You can also talk about your history and anything else that’s helpful for customers.
Keep the description short and sweet, and don’t try to push promotions or deals you have running. You also shouldn’t include URLs or HTML code. Give it a think, write a few descriptions and pick the best one!
After entering the attributes above, you’re asked to verify your listing. But don’t stop there. There are a few other attributes that are well worth your time to add.
Photos may be the most neglected attribute in all local SEO. The success of Instagram, Pinterest, and any lesser-known apps indicates how visual our internet culture has become. Consumers often select—or reject!—a business because of its photos. Not only on the content of the photos, but consumers also judge the quality and professionalism of the photos.
Photos are essential in the mobile ecosystem that Google Business Profile powers (including Google Maps), where they dominate a business’s representation in Google’s user interfaces. Try to add authentic photos instead of stock photos, and make sure the pictures reflect your business.
As with all local media or social media sites, Google Business Profile has its image format requirements. Take some time to review them and make sure you have high-quality assets for each format. You can find more on improving your images in our image SEO guide.
Selecting your opening hours is pretty straightforward. Google has dramatically improved its interface for telling customers when you’re open over the past several years. Hours will be front-and-center wherever customers interact with your business on Google, so they should be accurate. You can even daypart multiple times during the day and add specific hours for holidays and special events.
While you can’t control it, you may be interested to know that Google now displays the busyness of your business in real time. This is based on aggregate location-tracking visitors with Android phones and iOS Google Maps users with location services enabled.
Specific categories of businesses will have the option to add their menu. Suppose you’re lucky enough to be in one of these categories. In that case, we highly recommend adding this, as it gives Google an additional set of keywords that your business should consider relevant.
By default, this feature is turned on. It will add a messaging feature to your Business Profile, and it can be a great way to generate more leads. Of course, you need to keep this chat feature in mind and check regularly for any messages. If you respond quickly and helpfully, you’ll probably turn visitors into customers.
If you’re slow to respond to customers, however, Google might disable this feature for you. So, if you’re not sure you’ll be able to keep track of this feature, it might be better to turn it off.
The Posts feature is a very useful way to communicate with your customers from your profile. With posts, you can connect with existing and potential customers through your Business Profile on Google Search and Maps. You can create and share announcements, offers, new or popular items in stock, or event details directly with your customers. Use this to promote your sales, specials, events, news, and offers. You can even add videos and photos to posts to make them more interesting!
Since Google Business Profile has grown quite a bit over the years, there are many more options to explore. You don’t need to use all of them, but some are valuable. For example, the Products feature to highlight your products in your listing is a great way to get people interested in what your offer.
Another great option is the possibility of getting potential customers to ask questions that you can respond to. Keep in mind that others can also answer these questions, so keep an eye on this. When it works, it can be a real help in turning visitors into customers.
And, as always, get reviews for your business! With a Business Profile, you can even respond to these reviews. It doesn’t have to be a message. Nowadays, you can also quickly respond with an emoji, like a heart or fire emoji.
There are two significant local search and local SEO ranking factors over which you have little control. They both have to do with the physical location of your business.
The first is the proximity of your business to the location where your prospective customer is performing their search. All other things being equal, Google will display a company closer to the searcher than one farther away from them.
In the early years of Google, its algorithm favored businesses close to the center of a given city or its “centroid.” This was partly because Google wasn’t as good at detecting the location of the searcher as they are now. It defaulted to showing businesses in the areas with the highest population density.
Nowadays, this factor has declined in importance. Especially for mobile searches where Google has a precise idea of where you are. Google has also partially improved at detecting desktop searchers’ location information through surreptitious collection means.
The second factor is having an address in the city in which your customer is searching. If your customer is searching in Seattle, your Tacoma or Bellevue-based coffee shop won’t appear. This is simply because it’s irrelevant to the customer’s search.
Short of opening additional locations to target areas where high concentrations of your customers are searching, there’s not much you can do to optimize for these ranking factors. Still, you should be aware of their importance.
Google provides a free, lightweight analytics package as part of GBP. This gives you a basic sense of how customers and potential customers view and interact with your listing.
Insights show how often your listing appears in plain old search vs. Google Maps. It also shows the number of clicks to your website, requests for driving directions, phone calls, and more.
There’s also a breakdown of how many customers see your listing for direct searches (for your business specifically) vs. discovery searches (for businesses in your category). While no one outside of Google is entirely sure how they calculate the discovery number, it’s probably as good a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO as any, mainly if you track it over time.
The most typical GMB troubleshooting issue continues to be duplicate listings for the same business. While it’s gotten harder to detect duplicate listings, it’s much easier to close them.
The first step to identifying duplicates is to search for your business name on Google. If it looks like multiple listings refer to your business, select the one you’d like to report as a duplicate and click “Suggest an Edit.” Follow the suggestions to have the listing marked as duplicate.
Google support staff are generally responsive to these reports within a reasonable time. If you continue to have trouble, ask multiple people—co-workers, friends, family members, or relatives—to report the same problem, and it’s more likely Google will look at it. If your issue seems particularly thorny, you’re most likely to get a response by tweeting @googlemybiz, the official Twitter support channel for Google Business Profile.
Some time ago, Google added a new feature to the Google My Business dashboard. A feature that allows you to manage your reviews and report reviews for removal. You can also check the status of reviews you’ve already reported here. Keep in mind that Google will only remove reviews that violate their policies, such as irrelevant or offensive content.
Google increasingly depends on structured data to determine what your site is about and which elements represent what. This is true for your business information, including the information that Google Business Profile uses. Make sure you add the correct structured data to your site. Enhance your NAP details, opening hours, reviews, product information, et cetera, with Schema.org data. This will make it much easier for Google to determine the validity of your listing. Several tools can help you with this, including our Yoast Local SEO plugin.
So, you should activate and maintain your Google My Business account and make it awesome. But to get the most out of your listings and to get good rankings, you must have your site in order as well. Optimize every part of it. Create local content for your chosen keyword and business location and get quality local backlinks to build a solid link profile. Ask customers to review your business onsite or on My Business. Make sure your listing is active and attractive; as we said, inaccurate profiles are no good.
Read more: The ultimate guide to small business SEO »
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Do you have a website or maintain the website of the company you work for? Of course, to do this right, you need to keep a keen eye on the performance of your website. Google offers several tools to collect and analyze data from your website. You probably have heard of Google Analytics and Google Search Console before. These tools are free for everyone maintaining a website and can give you valuable insights about your website. Here, we’ll explain how to use Google Search Console for SEO!
Google Search Console helps you track the performance of your website easily. You can get valuable insights from your Google Search Console account, which means you can see what part of your website needs work. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed. This can also give a specific keyword more attention because the rankings or impressions are decreasing. Or find the reasons why some pages aren’t indexed.
Besides seeing this kind of data, you’ll get email notifications when Google Search Console notices new errors. Because of these notifications, you’re quickly aware of issues you must fix. That’s why everyone with a website should learn how to use it!
Search Console has several sections, which keep expanding as Google adds more:
You’ll need to create an account to start using Google Search Console. Within Google Search Console, you can click on ‘add a new property’ in the top bar:
You can insert the website you want to add by clicking the ‘Add property’ button. If you choose the new Domain option, you only need to add the domain name without www or subdomains. This option tracks everything connected to that domain. With the ‘old’ URL prefix option, you must add the correct URL, so with ‘HTTPS’ if you have an HTTPS website and with or without ‘www’. To collect the correct data, it’s essential to add the correct version:
You must verify that you’re the owner when you’ve added a website. There are several options to verify your ownership. The Domain option only works with DNS verification, while the URL prefix supports different methods. You can learn more about the differences in Google’s documentation: adding a new property and verifying your site ownership. You can also use Google’s Site Kit WordPress plugin to connect Analytics and Search Console while giving you statistics in your site dashboard.
For WordPress users who use Yoast SEO, get the verification code via the ‘HTML tag’ method from the Ownership settings in Search Console. Copy the long, random string of characters.
You can easily copy the code and paste it into the Google field in the ‘Site connections’ section in the settings of your Yoast SEO plugin:
After saving this, you can return to Google Search Console and click the ‘Verify’ button to confirm. If everything is ok, you’ll get a success message, and GSC will start collecting data for your website.
Now that you’ve set up your account, what’s the next step? Well, it’s time to look at some of your data! In the rest of this article, we’ll explore some of the reports and information available.
In the Performance tab, you can see the pages and keywords your website ranks for in Google. If you’re eligible for that, you’ll also find reports on your content’s performance in Google Discover and on Google News. You’ll get 16 months of performance data for your reports.
If you check the performance tab regularly, you can quickly see what keywords or pages need more attention and optimization. So, where to begin? Within the performance tab, you see a list of ‘queries’, ‘pages’, ‘countries’, or ‘devices’. With ‘search appearance,’ you can check how your rich results are doing in search. You can sort each section by the number of ‘clicks’, ‘impressions’, ‘average CTR’, or ‘average position’. We’ll explain each of them below:
The number of clicks tells you how often people clicked on your website in Google’s search results. This number can say something about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions: if just a few people click on your result, your result might not stand out in the search results. It can be helpful to check what other results are displayed around you to see how you can optimize your snippet.
The position of the search result also impacts the number of clicks. If your page is in the top three of Google’s first result page, it will automatically get more clicks than a page that ranks on the second page of the search results.
The impressions tell you how often your website or a specific page is shown in the search results. The number of impressions after this keyword shows how often our website is shown for that keyword in Google’s search results. You don’t know yet what page ranks for that keyword.
To see what pages might rank for the specific keyword, you can click on the line of the keyword. Doing this for a keyword, the keyword is added as a filter:
Afterward, you can navigate to the ‘Pages’ tab to see what pages rank for this keyword. Are those pages the ones you’d want to rank for that keyword? If not, you might need to optimize the page you’d like to rank. Think of writing better content containing the keyword on that page, adding internal links from relevant pages or posts to the page, making the page load faster, etc.
The CTR – Click-through rate – tells you what percentage of the people who have seen your website in the search results also clicked through to your website. You probably understand that higher rankings mostly also lead to higher click-through rates.
However, you can also do things yourself to increase the CTR. For example, you could rewrite your meta description and page title to make it more appealing — Yoast SEO has AI features to help you do that. When the title and description of your site stand out from the other results, more people will probably click on your result, and your CTR will increase. Remember that this will not significantly impact you if you’re not ranking on the first page yet. You might need to try other things first to improve your ranking.
The last one on this list is the ‘Average position’. This tells you the average ranking of a specific keyword or page in your selected period. Of course, this position isn’t always reliable since more and more people seem to get different search results. Google seems to understand better and better which results fit which visitor best. However, this indicator still shows whether the clicks, impressions and average CTR are explainable.
The’ Indexing’ section is a more technical but treasured addition to Google Search Console. This section shows how many pages have been in Google’s index since the last update, how many pages haven’t, and what errors and warnings caused Google to index your pages incorrectly. Google split this section into parts, collecting your regular pages and video pages while giving a home for your XML sitemap and the removals sections.
We recommend you check this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings appear on your website. However, you also get notifications when Google has found new errors. Please check the error in more detail when you get such a notification.
You may find that errors are caused when, e.g., a redirect doesn’t seem to work correctly, or Google finds broken code or error pages in your theme. You also find error messages like “Crawled – currently not indexed“. Google has a long list of possible reasons why pages aren’t indexed and what you can do to fix that.
Clicking on one of the issues, you can analyze the error more in-depth to see what specific URLs are affected. When you’ve fixed the error, you can mark it as fixed to make sure Google will test the URL again:
There are a few things you should always look for when checking out your indexing coverage reports:
We recommend you monitor these situations closely and resolve errors quickly, as too many errors could signal low quality (poor maintenance) to Google.
The URL Inspection tool helps you analyze specific URLs. You retrieve the page from Google’s index and compare it with the page as it lives now on your site to see if there are differences. You can also find more technical info on this page, such as when and how Google crawled it and how it looked at that moment. Sometimes, you’ll also notice several errors. This might be regarding Google’s inability to crawl your page correctly. It also gives information about the structured data found on this URL.
The experience report is an invaluable addition. It gives a good idea of how fast your site loads on mobile and desktop and how Google uses core web vitals to grade page experience. It shows which pages have issues that keep them from performing well. The data is based on the Chrome UX report, so it’s accurate data from real users.
Site speed, page experience, and user experience are complex topics with many moving parts, so learning how to think about page speed is good. The answer is here: how to check site speed.
If you have structured data on your site — provided by Yoast SEO, for instance — it’s a good idea to check out the Enhancements reports in Search Console. The Enhancements tab collects all the insights and improvements that could lead to rich results. It lists all the structured data that Google found on your site. There’s an ever-expanding list of rich results, and you can find the following, among other things:
All these tabs show how many valid enhancements you have or how many have errors or warnings. You get details about the kind of errors and warnings and on which URLs these are found. There’s also a trend line that shows if the number of issues is increasing or decreasing. And that’s just the start of it.
The Enhancements reports help you find and fix issues that hinder the performance of your rich results in search. By checking the issues, reading the support documentation, and validating fixes, you can increase your chance of getting rich results in search. We have a more expansive guide on the structured data Enhancement reports in Google Search Console.
An XML sitemap is a roadmap to all important pages and posts on your website. Every website would benefit from having one. Do you run the Yoast SEO plugin on your website? Then, you automatically have an XML sitemap. If not, we recommend creating one to ensure Google can easily find your most important pages and posts.
You can find an option for XML sitemaps within the Indexing tab of Google Search Console. Here, you can tell Google where your XML sitemap is located on your site:
We recommend that everyone enter the URL of their XML sitemap into GSC to make it easy for Google to find. In addition, you can quickly see if your sitemap gives errors or if some pages aren’t indexed. Regularly checking this ensures that Google can find and read your XML sitemap.
We recommend regularly checking the XML sitemap section in our plugin to manage which post types or taxonomies you include in your sitemaps!
Google Search Console also has a Shopping section. Here, you can check how Google sees your products and if they get proper rich results. You’ll see if they are valid or if they are missing fields that make the product snippets more prominent. Click on a product to see which fields are missing for particular products and if these are essential parts or nice-to-haves. If you’ve added these to the structured data of your products, you validate the fix in Search Console.
In the Shopping section, you’ll also find your Google Merchant listings and an option to enable shopping tab listings to show your products on the Shopping tab in Google Search. With these options, Google gives ecommerce site owners — and people selling stuff — more ways of checking how their listings are doing.
Within the links to your site section, you can see how many links from other sites are pointing to your website. Besides, you can see what websites link, how many links those websites contain, and what anchor texts are used most when linking to your website. This can be valuable information because links are still vital for SEO.
Within the internal links section, you can check what pages of your website are most linked from other spots on your site. This list can be valuable to analyze regularly because you want your most important pages and posts to get the most internal links. By doing this, you make sure Google understands your cornerstones as well.
You don’t want to see anything in the manual actions tab. If Google penalizes your site, you’ll get more information. If your site is affected by a manual action, you’ll also get an email message.
Several scenarios can lead to these kinds of penalties, including:
Within the security issues tab, you’ll get a notification when your website seems to have a security issue.
Reading this post should give you a good idea of what Search Console is capable of and how to use it, so we’d like to ask you this: Do you already use Google Search Console for your website? If not, create an account to collect data about your website. Do you think something is missing? Feel free to leave a comment!
Read on: How to make your site stand out in the search results »
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In SEO, using top tools is key. Yoast and Semrush have joined forces to combine their technologies. This integration benefits WordPress and Shopify users by improving their SEO work. Yoast SEO offers easy-to-use SEO features, while Semrush brings solid data that can be used for keyword research. This article will explore the Related Keyphrase feature, which uses Semrush’s keyword data.
SEO involves more than just content optimization; it requires understanding the search landscape and adopting strategies. The Yoast SEO and Semrush integration offers powerful tools for various SEO areas, like finding keywords, planning, implementation, and analysis.
Benefits for WordPress users include enhanced keyword research. You can access Semrush’s vast database from the WordPress editor to find and apply effective related keywords. Get real-time SEO suggestions to refine your content as you write using current SEO data. This integration simplifies your work. You don’t have to jump between tools and platforms as much, so you can concentrate on writing content that ranks.
Advantages for Shopify store owners include access to ecommerce keywords. These insights help drive targeted traffic to your store. Conduct SEO health checks to analyze and optimize product descriptions and meta tags, ensuring full SEO compliance. Integrating targeted keywords into your Shopify store’s content enhances visibility and boosts conversion potential.
Setting up the integration is simple for both WordPress and Shopify users. Connect your Semrush account to Yoast through the plugin or app interface. This lets you access keyword analytics and SEO advice right in your dashboard. If you haven’t installed Yoast SEO yet, start there. We offer a guide to help you with the setup.
Related keyphrases, or related keywords, are terms linked to your main keyword. They boost your content’s relevance, which helps search engines grasp your page’s topic and details. Adding related keyphrases makes your content more comprehensive and informative. This enhances its visibility in search results, as search engines favor pages that cover a topic thoroughly.
Using related keyphrases also avoids keyword stuffing, leading to more natural, reader-friendly text. This approach attracts more organic traffic and helps your content rank for a wider range of search queries.
Navigate to the post or page you wish to optimize in the content editor. To access the Semrush tool, locate the Focus keyphrase section and enter your main focus keyphrase. Then, click the Get related keyphrases button, and a pop-up will appear.
Semrush presents related keyphrases in the pop-up, including search volume, search intent, difficulty, and trends. For more detailed insights or to explore further, use the Keyword Magic Tool in Semrush. Alternatively, use your preferred keyword research tools to gather additional insights.
Semrush’s search volume data shows how often users search for a specific keyword or keyphrase each month. This metric highlights the keyword’s popularity and demand. High search volume suggests strong interest, while low volume indicates fewer searches. You can use search volume data to identify trends over time, spotting seasonal or emerging keywords. Analyzing these volumes helps you gauge your content’s potential reach and find high-demand keywords to target.
However, high search volumes often mean high competition. Balancing search volume with keyword difficulty is key. Keyword Difficulty measures how hard it is to rank in the top ten for a keyword, ranging from 0% to 100%. Lower percentages mean less competition, making it easier to rank, while higher percentages indicate tough competition requiring significant effort.
Semrush provides tools to integrate search intent into your keyword research. Understanding search intent allows you to tailor content to user needs, improving rankings and attracting relevant traffic.
Semrush offers a search intent metric for each keyword, helping you identify whether a keyword is navigational, informational, commercial, or transactional. This insight lets you align your content with user searches. For instance, commercial intent keywords might lead to content focused on comparisons or reviews, while transactional keywords benefit from clear calls-to-action.
You can explore keywords based on search intent using Yoast SEO’s Related Keyphrases tool. This helps you target the most relevant keywords for your content goals. You might focus on informational keywords for a blog aimed at new audiences. For an ecommerce site, combining commercial and transactional keywords can attract potential buyers to your product pages.
Select the most relevant and beneficial related keyphrases from the list provided by Semrush. Focus on search volume, difficulty, and how they relate to your main topic. You can add up to four additional related keyphrases to your content. Yoast SEO will factor in these related keyphrases when analyzing your content and offering suggestions for improvement.
After selecting the best keywords, add them naturally to your content. Avoid keyword stuffing. Use related keyphrases in sections like subheadings, bullet points, and within the body text. Ensure they complement the primary keyphrase and enrich the content’s context.
Include related keyphrases in meta descriptions and image alt texts to expand your content’s relevance. Yoast SEO will give feedback on their integration and suggest improvements.
Once you’ve integrated the related keyphrases, check the analysis from Yoast SEO. The plugin will offer tips for further optimization. Focus on readability and overall keyword usage. Adjust your content based on Yoast SEO’s suggestions to ensure it’s optimized for primary and related keyphrases.
The Yoast SEO and Semrush integration is a great tool for marketers, content creators, and ecommerce professionals. This partnership helps improve your SEO on WordPress and Shopify by combining data-driven keyword research with practical SEO implementation.
Enhance your SEO by connecting Yoast SEO and Semrush today. Experience the benefits of integrated SEO tools right at your fingertips. Have fun exploring the integration!
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SEO is a way to get more traffic to your website. By ranking high on Google, you attract more people to your site, which leads to more sales and returning visitors. You must optimize your content for the right words to get people to your site. However, you should consider search intent to increase your chances of ranking, convincing people to buy your stuff, subscribing to your newsletter, or even returning to your website. We’ll tell you what search intent is and how you can optimize your content for search intent.
Search intent (or user intent, audience intent) is the term used to describe the purpose of an online search. It’s the reason why someone conducts a specific search. After all, everyone who does an online search hopes to find something. But is someone looking for an answer to a question they have? Are they looking to visit a specific website? Or are they searching online because they want to buy something? Many of these types of searches are part of the user journey online, but often they represent different stages.
Over the years, Google has worked hard to improve its algorithm to determine people’s search intent. Google wants to rank pages that best fit the search term someone is using and the search intent behind the search query. That’s why you need to make sure that your post or page fits your audience’s search intent.
There are a few distinct types of search intent. We’ll go into the four most commonly used ones, but we’ll start with an infographic describing the four types in short:
The first type of search intent is called navigational intent. People with this intent want to visit a specific website. For example, people searching for [Facebook] online are usually on their way to the website. So, you want to make sure that your website can be found when someone searches for your company’s name online.
Remember that ranking high for a navigational term is mainly beneficial if your site is what people are looking for. Years ago, we had a Google Analytics plugin that ranked well for the term [Google Analytics]. But that didn’t drive any traffic to our site. People searching for [Google Analytics] specifically were looking for the Google Analytics website and were often not interested in our plugin.
On to informational intent. People looking for information do lots of searches on the internet. This could be information about the weather, educating children, SEO, you name it. People with informational intent have a specific question or want to know more about a topic.
You should know that Google understands intent beyond simply showing results that give information about a specific term. It knows, for instance, that people looking for [tomato sauce] are most likely looking for recipes, not for the sauce’s culinary history. It understands that most people typing in [Mercury] are looking for the planet, not the element. Google even understands it’s handy to include videos and images for search terms, like [how to build a bird feeder].
Some people intend to buy in the (near) future and use the web to research. What washing machine would be best? Which WordPress SEO plugin is the most helpful? These people also have transactional intent but need more time and convincing. These types of search intents are usually called commercial investigating intents.
The fourth type of search intent is transactional intent. Many people buy stuff online and browse the web to find the best purchase. People are searching with transactional intent when they intend to buy something at that moment. That means that they already know exactly what they want to buy and want to get to that product page immediately.
People’s words in their search queries give us insight into user intent. This also works the other way around. By formulating keywords with intent-specific words, you can increase your chances of being seen by people with matching search intent.
What do we mean by intent-specific words? Well, keywords with transactional intent will often contain words like:
To give another example, informational searches can (but don’t necessarily have to) contain words like:
Why are we telling you this? Because you want to ensure that a landing page fits your audience’s search intent. If people are looking for information, you don’t want to show them a product page. At least, not immediately. You’ll scare them away. But if someone wants to buy your product and lands on one of your lengthier blog posts, you might lose them. In this case, you want to lead them to your shop and the right product page.
Optimizing your product pages for commercially driven keywords is a good idea. For instance, if you sell dog vitamins, you could optimize a product (category) page for the search term [buy dog vitamins]. Perhaps you also have an article about administering vitamins. You could optimize that article for the search term [how to give vitamins to my dog] and aim it at people with informational intent.
Sometimes, it can be quite hard to determine the search intent of a query. And perhaps different users that use the same search term will have a (slightly) different user intent. Luckily, there is a direct source to look at to know which intent fits your keywords best: the search results pages. Find out how you can use the results pages to create intent-based content.
If you want to know more about your audience’s search intent, another way is to ask them. Create a short survey containing questions about what people are searching for, and make that survey pop up when people visit your website. That’ll give you valuable insights into your audience and their intent. Please don’t be too intrusive with these kinds of pop-ups, as this can hurt the user experience on your website.
Aiming your content with the right intent is important, but it becomes even more important for ecommerce content. Here’s how to apply this with a focus on ecommerce.
Start by identifying the intent behind your main keyword. In ecommerce, this often revolves around transactional or commercial investigation intents. If users are ready to buy (“transactional”), your content should guide them toward purchasing. If they’re still researching (“commercial investigation”), provide comparisons, reviews, or detailed product information.
Look for related keyphrases that match these intents. Use tools like the Semrush integration in Yoast SEO to find variations that potential customers might use. For a keyword like “buy running shoes online,” related phrases could include “discount running shoes,” “running shoes with free shipping,” or “best price running shoes.”
In the Yoast SEO Related Keyphrases interface, the different intents will be color-coded using Semrush’s system:
Examine search results for the keyphrases you’ve found to see what ecommerce sites are doing. Pay attention to product pages, reviews, and comparison guides that rank well. This helps you understand what customers expect and how you can differentiate your offerings.
Incorporate these keyphrases naturally into your product descriptions, category pages, and blog posts. Make sure the content answers potential buyer questions and highlights unique selling points. Include clear calls to action to drive purchases, especially for transactional intent.
If you focus well on search intent, you can create content that improves SEO and enhances the shopping experience. Ultimately, you want higher conversions and better customer satisfaction.
It’s crucial to ensure that your content fits the terms people are searching for and your audience’s search intent. Ensure your post or page is informational when people seek information. Be the first result when someone searches for your company name. Provide content that helps people make an informed decision while still investigating their options. But lead people to your sales pages if they want to buy one of your products.
Read more: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »
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