Keywords, User Intent, and Interaction Signals

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

AIDA model

A useful concept to consider when looking at keywords and the buying cycle is the AIDA model. This well-known marketing model traces the customer journey through stages of Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action, and it’s a helpful framework to keep in mind when planning your keyword and Search strategy. 

Aligning with keywords

From a keyword planning point of view, the AIDA model aligns with three types of keywords. They are informational, navigational, and transactional keywords.

For example, informational keywords are most common in the first two stages of the AIDA model, so during the Awareness and Interest stages. 

Navigational keywords can be seen in all stages, while transactional keywords cover the last two stages of the AIDA model, and particularly the Action stage before a purchase.

Since you need to connect with users throughout their buyer journey, it’s important that your keyword strategy satisfies each stage of the AIDA model. 

Best practices

For example, if you’re in ecommerce, don’t make the common mistake of including exclusively transactional content on your website. Doing so will mean you are missing out on a huge volume of Search potential. In fact, research by Moz shows that informational keywords account for around 70% of total search traffic. That means you'll miss out on a large proportion of traffic if you don’t take the full breadth of the AIDA model into account. 

And remember, Google looks for evidence of E-A-T content on a website when evaluating its quality. E-A-T content tends to be informational content, rather than transactional, so if you post exclusively transactional content it’s going to adversely affect your page’s quality rating.

Finally, it’s also harder to garner backlinks to transactional content, and buying links would of course be against Google's guidelines. But it's actually much easier to build backlinks to informational content, since it's more impartial and useful for the user. 

So, keep these points in mind when you’re planning your keyword strategy. Reach out to users at each stage of the AIDA model and demonstrate high-levels of E-A-T content when creating informational pages. 

User intent and interaction signals

What is user intent?

The user intent of a keyword is the goal a person has when entering a search term into a search engine. When the need of a searcher has been fully met, user satisfaction has been achieved.

You can understand whether a need has been met by looking at user interaction signals. A user interaction signal is a measurement used by search engines to evaluate the experience of its users, both positively and negatively, when interacting with a specific result and for a specific keyword.

User interaction signals

Google is quite clear on the importance of user interaction signals, as you can see from the following quote:
“Beyond looking at keywords, our systems also analyze if content is relevant to a query in other ways. We also use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether Search results are relevant to queries. We transform that data into signals that help our machine-learned systems better estimate relevance.”

While Google does not explicitly say what anonymized interaction data it uses, many SEOs believe this to be dwell time, pogo sticking, and clickthrough rate.

Dwell time is the amount of time from when a searcher clicks a result, visits the page, and then returns back to the search results.

While a dwell time metric is not publicly available to SEOs, it’s believed search engines use it as one way to distinguish whether a user is satisfied by the results they see for a specific keyword.

If a searcher clicks on a listing but then immediately clicks back to look at other search results, we call this pogo sticking. It’s something you’ll want to avoid because it signals to search engines that the user is dissatisfied with the content because they have spent minimal time on your site.

Clickthrough rate is the percentage of searchers who click on a listing over the competition. A higher clickthrough rate, particularly for what is expected in its position, can indicate user satisfaction.

Now, the use of user interaction signals is a widely debated topic in SEO. One reason is because Google has explicitly said it doesn’t use bounce rate as a ranking factor. While bounce rate is related to dwell time and pogo sticking, it is different. It’s also a

Google Analytics metric, so it would be unfair if Google used this data in its algorithms.

That said, the consensus by most SEO experts is that Google uses dwell time, pogo sticking, and clickthrough rates as a way of reviewing “Needs met”, and whether the searcher experienced high-quality content that satisfied the user intent of the keyword they searched.