Map user journeys to search queries and prompts
Chasing keywords without understanding user intent wastes resources and opportunities
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Semrush Enterprise & AI Optimization
Chasing keywords without understanding user intent wastes resources and opportunities. Search engines prioritize delivering results that align with what users need at specific moments in their journey, from exploring a problem to buying a product. This is why very “broad” keywords stopped being useful to optimize for nearly two decades ago. An informational site would find it almost impossible to rank highly on a transactional keyword and vice versa.
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Optimizing for intent means mapping search queries to the user journey, ensuring every touchpoint drives engagement and conversion. By aligning your product’s features and content with the purpose behind searches, you capture high-value users and build a sustainable SEO program.
Understand Intent First
Search intent reflects the user’s goal at a given moment, whether they’re seeking information, evaluating options, or ready to act. These moments align with stages of the user journey: problem-aware, solution-aware, and product-aware. Each stage corresponds to distinct query types, and understanding these connections is the foundation of SEO that drives ROI.
A user searching “where to go on summer vacation” is likely problem-aware, seeking insights into a challenge. A query like “cheap ways to get to Thailand” indicates a solution-aware user comparing options. Meanwhile, someone searching “Westin Bangkok” is product-aware and ready to convert.
Mapping queries to the user journey lets you create content and product experiences that meet users exactly where they are, guiding them toward conversion. The objective is to move beyond generic keyword strategies and focus on the reasoning behind the search. This requires analyzing the user’s context, pain points, and goals, then aligning your product’s features and content to address those needs.
Empathize With the User
The first step in optimizing for intent is identifying queries that align with each stage of the user’s journey. This involves combining customer insights and product knowledge with keywords to uncover what users are searching for and why.
Before you touch any keyword research tool, think about how you would search for your own products and services if you were the user. If you can’t visualize those queries, you need to understand your users’ needs first before developing any marketing strategies.
Only once you’ve searched test queries as if you are the user does it help to use a keyword tool to narrow down your lists.
You should also leverage customer data to refine your query list with insights from support tickets, community forums, or in-app feedback to uncover the questions users ask at different stages. A typical support query, such as “how to integrate [your product] with Slack,” reveals product-aware intent that can be turned into an indexable guide. Survey data from churned users might highlight problem-aware queries like “how to reduce annual pricing,” which can inform content plans. By doing this, you ground your SEO efforts in what your product actually delivers to the users, creating a direct path from search to activation.
Build What They Need
Once you’ve identified intent-driven queries, develop SEO oriented content that aligns with each stage of the user journey. This content would be visible for relevant searches, guiding users toward the next step, whether that’s learning more, evaluating your product, or making a purchase.
Problem-aware users require educational content that tackles their specific challenges without imposing a solution. These pieces establish authority and introduce your brand as a helpful resource. Focus on thoroughly explaining the problem and providing actionable insights, linking to solution-aware content where appropriate to guide users forward in their journey.
Solution-aware users are comparing tools or methods to solve their problem. Develop content that showcases your product’s capabilities without being overtly promotional. This can be incredibly valuable for citations in AI responses, and these pages serve as valuable last steps for solution-aware users who know what they want. Include case studies or testimonials to build credibility and link to product-aware content like a free trial or demo to move users forward.
Product-aware users are familiar with your product and are seeking specific guidance, such as setup instructions or features. Content and pages that explain your products and features might not be the highest volume searches, but they’re necessary if you want to be the final word on why a customer should use your products rather than a competitor. Allowing a Reddit thread or review site to own these terms does not serve your SEO purposes.
Compare the results of these two searches: “best T-Mobile plans for teens” and “best Verizon plans for teens”.
T-Mobile has given up these keywords to YouTube and Reddit because they don’t have a landing page.
On the other hand, Verizon does have a page and owns its own branded results.
Product-aware pages also work well as landing pages for AI citations, and it shouldn’t really matter whether the user clicks through from the search results or gets the answer from the LLM, because they are still selling the brand. They’re particularly effective because they leverage your product’s proprietary functionality, making them difficult for competitors to replicate.
Product-Led SEO
The most effective intent-driven SEO strategies are embedded within the product itself, aligning search queries with what the user seeks. This is where Product-Led SEO delivers significant impact, turning features like onboarding flows, templates, or error pages into indexable assets that capture high-intent traffic.
Create programmatic pages that scale with your product. If you offer templates, make each one indexable with unique descriptions and use cases. If you have integrations, create individual pages that target “[your product] + [integration]” queries. These pages serve dual purposes: they capture product-aware traffic and they function as self-service resources that reduce support burden.
You should also consider optimizing your product’s help center or documentation for search visibility. Many companies treat these as internal resources, missing the opportunity to be visible for high-intent queries. Structure documentation with SEO in mind, using clear URLs, descriptive titles, and comprehensive answers to common questions. Users who answer their own queries rather than reaching out to customer support save you money.
Measure What Matters
To ensure your intent-driven SEO strategy delivers results, track metrics that reflect user engagement and conversion, not just rankings. Monitor organic traffic to intent-specific pages and track user progress through the journey.
Track activation rates for users who arrive through different intent-driven queries - as seen in Google Search Console, NOT RANKING tools. A user who lands on a product-aware guide should have a higher activation rate than one who arrives at a problem-aware blog post. If they don’t, your content isn’t effectively moving users forward.
Regularly analyze search performance to identify gaps in intent coverage. If users are searching for queries you haven’t addressed, you’re missing opportunities to capture traffic and guide users toward your product. Iterate based on user feedback and product usage data to ensure your content remains aligned with evolving needs.
Optimizing for intent transforms SEO from a keyword exercise into a strategic alignment with the user journey. Never forget that your users are potential customers and not just click metrics.
[Sponsored by North Star Inbound ]
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