Before building a page to sell your product or service, you need to establish how people would search for your site. The main goal is to provide a solution to their problem so you have to frame the question in the most immediate and clear terms possible.
[su_box title=”Let’s define searcher intent first.” color=”#3a80f1″] The purpose for someone’s search query to find a product or answer to their “problem”[/su_box]
What are the different kinds of searcher intent?
People search for information. They ask Google direct questions and nowadays you can find the answer within the search result without any need to leave the google page. SEOs call this position zero or featured snippets.
Learn how to gain a featured snippet by contacting me today.
People search for products they want to buy now. This has become a massive market for Google the past few years. Google can now distinguish between different forms of buying intent. Do you want to buy locally or online? Do you want to buy from a shopping search engine (like google shopping) or from a direct website like Amazon? Google has learned to match the best result to your needs so it’s important you provide the correct metadata when building your website so you are easily found.
People search for other sites. It might seem humorous to watch but a lot of people go to Google to find urls which are obvious to the more experienced internet users.
People search for products they are considering buying. The prevalence of sites which do nothing but send you on your way to Amazon (affiliate sites) is so pervasive, it’s almost certain that when you search for a product one of the top three sites will not actually be selling anything at all. For the most part, these sites provide a service. They inform you about the pros and cons of a particular product, but sometimes they are only motivated to get you to buy the most expensive product in the niche so be careful when reading reviews.
Building a Landing Page With Searcher Intent in Mind
This is the main point of the article. How are you going to build a landing page with the searcher intent properly framed to match your product or service? There’s no hard and fast rule about this. As the seller you have to understand your market and your customer. If you don’t you’ll probably fail in your business regardless if its online or offline. There are a few ways to illuminate what your searcher intent might be.
- Split test different headlines and presentation styles. Try something flashy, try something conservative. Change up the color orientation of the buttons and the shades of the product images. Observe which landing page performs best and further refine until your sales numbers are growing at the healthy pace.
- Explore different sources of traffic. Some products do better on social media while others perform better on Amazon. Some products even require you to give them away and get people comfortable with them before they would even consider putting up money (hello New York Times online!)
- Experiment with psychological marketing techniques. Scarcity, reward programs and different levels of customer service are all effective forms of discovering customer intent.
- Competitor semantics. Look at how your competitors speak to your target customer and apply a similar rubric.
If all else fails you can always just ask your friends and potential customers. How can I find you online? Where are you most likely to discover my product and how can I make you a satisfied buyer? You’d be surprised, a lot of the time all it takes is some open-minded listening and most people will be more than pleased to offer their priceless opinion on how you can take their money.
If you’d like to discuss searcher intent with me or argue anything mentioned in the article, leave a comment or contact me on facebook anytime. I am more than happy to discuss your marketing needs.
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