How To Find Keyword Intent and Increase Conversions in Travel SEO
Keyword intent – the holy grail for increasing conversions. Understanding the customer journey and intent behind the key phrases which searchers use will ensure that the content on your landing pages, category pages and most importantly your blog are catering to the right market.
Fortunately, finding intent keywords is extremely easy, meaning you can quickly implement such phrases into your strategy. Simply follow these steps and you’ll have a list of keyword intent phrases at your finger tips in no time.
The first step is to actually source the data. Whilst there are numerous keyword research tools out there, finding intent keyword phrases can be done with the use of just two: Google Adwords, and SEMrush.
For this example, we will be using a key term in the travel sector; holidays.
1. Enter the keyword or phrase you are interested in.
2. Download the data into an Excel CSV file.
3. Once in Excel, remove any mention of the word “holiday”.
This can be achieved by highlighting column B and using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + H, which brings up the ‘Find and Replace’ box.
4. Type holidays into the Find box and click Replace All.
This essentially deletes the word ‘holidays’ from the search terms used and leaves the brand, location and intent search phrases.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of the high traffic volume phrases are related to the ‘cheap’, ‘discount’ and ‘value added’ sector; aka targeting the lower to middle tier markets.
Google Keyword Planner is useful in pulling out search data, but a problem we find is the low level of data supplied. Usually the keyword toll will return between 500 and 800 phrases, which is often not enough to make large decisions.
This is where the second tool, SEMrush, comes in. This uses a much larger data set by using Google API and other proprietary software – you can find out more about how SEMrush sources its data here.
Using SEMrush
1. Enter the main search phrase into the search box at the top and click search.
There is also the option to look at different languages if needed.
2. This will bring up the SEMrush dashboard.
Immediately, you can see the size difference in the data set available; an extra 54,000 holiday related search terms in comparison to Google Keyword Planner.
3. Download the data to Excel CSV by clicking export -this may take a few minutes due to the size of data.
4. Follow the procedure used with the Google data set, except this time using column A instead of B.
By using a larger data set, you can expand your research to look for more user intent search terms on a higher level.
Once the data set has been downloaded, it can be filtered to find intent based key phrases to look at terms used in the stages of consumer purchase decision-making, such as research, comparison and impulse.
An example of a research phrase search term is ‘best’:
An example of an incentivised search term is ‘book’
While these are just examples, it shows how these easily downloaded data set can be used to understand your customer journey. This information can in turn be used to structure your PPC campaigns, SEO campaigns, copy for specific landing pages and category pages; as well as the content that is pushed out on the company blog.
It will also allow you to tailor your website to rank for intent search terms, as these are more likely to get you the traffic, visibility and conversions.
