We don’t know how huge is the world of search engine optimization (SEO) but knowing user intent is important. Informational keywords are essential for directing searchers to the answers and insights they need.
People searching for guidance, explanations or solutions to their queries, without making a purchase, often use these keywords. Targeting these keywords gives businesses and marketers opportunity to get noticed, establish themselves as authority, achieve trust and bring in top-of-funnel traffic.
In this article you’re going to learn what informational searches are, why they are important, and how to leverage them by incorporating them into your SEO strategy.
What Are Informational Keywords?
Phrases that people use to learn about a topic, instead of purchase a product or service are called informational keywords. Curiosity, also to acquire knowledge, without intention to carry out a transaction quickly.
If you look at someone who is searching “how to cook quinoa” or “what is SEO” you know for sure they are looking for guidance or explanations.
These are a diverse range of keywords (are more often the longer tail phrases and indicate that the searcher is trying to find an answer, let alone a solution).
Informational intent keywords are different than transactional keywords such as ‘buy running shoes’ or navigational keywords such as ‘Facebook login’ because they are build around answering questions, offering insight, and educating your audience.
Example Informational Keywords:
- How to Start a Blog
- What is SEO Marketing
- Best Ways to Lose Weight
- How to Grow Tomatoes Indoors
Identifying and targeting these queries correctly can lead to relevant traffic for your website.
Why Informational Keywords Matter for SEO?
The information keywords are crucial for the development of a good seo strategy as it serves the users at the early stage of their buyer’s journey. You can draw up a lot of traffic by making high quality content addressing the common questions and with useful information.
This will eventually increase your engagement and conversions because users will start trusting your content and returning for more info or making purchases. Google especially gives the best priority to relevance and useful information.
If your content answers users’ queries well, that’s a cue to Google that your page is a good resource for these people, so you should rank higher for these terms. Also, information on content has a longer shelf life and can remain driving traffic many months to years later, as users keep searching for similar topics.
How to Find Informational Keywords?
Before that, you have to look deep into finding informational intent keywords which means you have to identify common questions, search phrases in your niche. Here are some effective tools and techniques to find these valuable keywords:
1. Google’s Auto-Suggestions
Type your main topic in the Google search bar and you will see in the auto suggestions, often simple informational queries people type and google answers. As an example, if a person searches for “SEO”, it would auto suggest “how to learn SEO” or “SEO tips for beginners”.
2. AnswerThePublic
Visualize what are the top questions and the queries people ask about your target keyword with this free tool. Now this is a great way to look up natural language phrases being asked around your niche.
3. Keyword Research Tools
Within competitive keyword research you can use SEMrush, Ubersuggest, Moz to discover long tail informational keywords with high search volume and low competition. Data on keyword trends, search volume and competition level is provided by these tools.
4. Quora and Reddit
Finding real user questions in these forums is goldmine. What to do is search through relevant threads and find exactly what your audience is asking and build informational search based on that.
5. Google Trends
Google Trends allow us to see how popular certain keywords have been in time. This is a great way to keep track of what information keywords are on the up and use that to align your content around.
How to Use Informational Keywords Effectively in SEO?
Having found out what informational intent keywords are and how you can find them, it is now time to put them into play strategically in your overall SEO plan. The following advice can help you use them efficiently:
1) Content Creation
Create detailed high quality content that answers the questions or answers to the suggested informational keywords. Instead of focusing on a short form of content, such as social media posts, focus on creating long form content, like blog posts, how to guides, or FAQs that answer users questions thoroughly.
2) On-Page SEO
Your informational keywords must be placed naturally within your SEO elements like title tag, meta description, headings, the body of your content. Don’t overoptimize, rather, write valuable, well written answers that naturally include keywords.
3) Internal Linking
You should use informational content to link to other pages that you have on your site. Let’s say, for instance, you write a blog post ‘How to search the best SEO tools’ and link to your product or service pages. This is good so that search engines can decipher the relationship of the content and the traffic that leads to conversion focused pages.
4) Answer User Questions
Create content so that when users enter the search, it answers their questions fully and directly. The content becomes more useful and relevant, the larger the chances that it will be featured by Google in Answer Box or People Also Ask.
5) SEO Best Practices
Don’t forget general SEO best practices: How to optimize page load speeds, how to make sure your pages are mobile friendly, how to use images and videos to support your content, as well as how to keep your users engaged with powerful calls to action.
Best Informational Keywords Examples:
Let’s look at some real-world examples of informational searches across different industries:
(a) Health & Fitness: How to lose belly fat fast?
(b) Technology: What is cloud computing?
(c) Food & Cooking: Vegetarian dinner recipes
(d) Travel: That list of best places to visit in Europe
You can target these informational queries because you can provide value to them by answering common questions in your niche while also attracting them as visitors.
Challenges with Informational Keywords:
While targeting informational intent keywords can be highly beneficial, there are a few challenges to keep in mind:
1. High Competition
Some popular informational keywords, like ‘what is seo’, ‘how to lose weight’ can be very competitive. Therefore, targeting the long tail keywords (more specific phrases) can actually minimize your competition and increase your amount of qualified traffic.
2. Conversion Challenges
Informational content doesn’t necessarily translate to conversions. People researching answers aren’t always ready to buy. But informational content can be an excellent lead generation tool, providing you an opportunity to nurture leads with follow up content or offers.
3. Content Maintenance
Updating evergreen content like it requires regular updates because informational content is useful and exists only for how it is relevant and has a big ‘Establishment’ to live up to. That could be adding some new information, update some statistics or respond to some emerging trends.
Conclusion
If you are building a niche brand, informational keywords are important for bringing you organic traffic and earning you authority in your niche. By knowing what these keywords mean and how to work them into your SEO playbook, you can make content that will appeal to searchers and boost your website’s audience.
Informational intent keywords can also be used as part of a broader SEO strategy, and serve as the first step in converting users to long term customers or leads as part of a broader SEO strategy.
When you concentrate on producing high quality and user centric content that answers particular queries, you don’t just rank better on search engines, but also create trust and engagement with your audience. Today, start integrating informational keywords and watch your traffic grow!
