How you can use search intent tips to boost your affiliate performance and earn more.

Understanding search intent can help you boost your affiliate performance. By dedicating time to researching “Know”, “Do” and “Go” queries can help you create content that puts you in front of the consumer at the right stage in the purchasing cycle. Discover more search intent tips that can help you drive leads and earn revenue.

Zero Moment of Truth

The Zero Moment of Truth is the point in the buying cycle when the user is researching the product. It’s a phrase coined by Google as they set out to define consumer behavior in an evolving digital world.

This is the moment between initial awareness and the moment the prospect interacts with a brand before they make a purchasing decision.

As a marketer, your number one goal should be to get in front of the buyer when they are ready to act. That seems obvious enough, but what content do you need to appear at this very important stage in the buying cycle? Discover search intent tips that can help you with this.

Search Intent

Search intent plays a vital role in your SEO strategy. According to Altavista employee, Andrei Broder, there are three types of search intent:

• Informational searches
• Transactional searches
• Navigational searches

Broder conducted research around search intent and how search engines have evolved to deal with web-specific needs. You can read more here.

 Informational Searches

These general searches are conducted by top of funnel people, who aren’t ready to convert yet. If you are promoting short term loans for ArrowShade, examples of informational searches could be:

• What is a short-term loan?
• What is a typical short-term loan term?
• What are some short-term loan companies?

The likelihood of conversion at this point in the buyer journey is low, so while they may not be terms you include in your PPC campaigns, these are still good queries you would want to rank for organically.

Answering these queries on your site puts your brand in front of users at the beginning of their buyer journey. You might be placing yourself on SERPS your competitors are ignoring. Depending on the brand you are promoting and the product, there may be many more top of funnel searches than bottom of the funnel, allowing you to reach more people.

Transactional Searches

These queries are conducted by people ready to make a purchase. These types of terms are related to the products you are promoting.

Short-term loan transactional queries could include terms like:

• Apply for short-term loan
• Best short-term loan lender
• [brand name] short term loans
• Apply for short-term loans online

Ranking or bidding on transactional queries is vital to your affiliate marketing success. If you’re new to affiliate marketing or new to an affiliate program, this is where you want to start.

Always start with transactional queries, since they target users at the bottom of the funnel or further along the buyer journey.

Keep in mind, these terms are typically going to be the hardest to rank for and most expensive to bid on.

Navigational Searches

Navigational searches don’t require much in terms of optimization. These queries occur when the buyer has a destination already in mind. This typically applies to a well-known brand or popular website.

That means there’s often only one type of search they’re going to use, your website name or the name of the offer you are promoting.

How to Apply Search Intent to Google

Google has been working to tackle search intent for quite some time now. They have defined the three types of searches as:

• “Know” – informational searches
• “Do” – transactional searches
• “Go” – navigational searches

To act on these three types of queries you can use tools like Keyword Keg. To use this tool, you will put your seek keywords into the search box. Choose a country, language and API (Google, Bing, eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.). Next, select what kind of results you want.

Keyword Keg will provide you with:

• Search volume
• CPC
• Competition
• SEO Difficulty
• Value
• CTR Scope
• Keyword Power
• Trends

Export these results into Excel and then create groupings based on the three search intent types (know, do, go).

Use the knowledge graph column to identify the “Go” keywords. To discover “Know” keywords, use the snippets column. This will show you which keywords have search volume and whether you can rank for it. The spreadsheet will also tell you with queries have video or image content in the SERP.

To find “Do” queries, filter by the “Search Result” column. You can filter by words like “buy” or “apply.” These terms show clear intent to make a purchase a decision.

Summary

Start applying these search intent tips today. Take time to research “Know,” “Do” and “Go” queries to create content around the various consumer stages and target your audience at different stages in the purchasing cycle. You can reach more people and guide them along the buyer journey towards conversion to increase your affiliate marketing revenue.