The paradigm shift happening in consumer search right now is transformational for marketers. The rise of voice search, chatbots, mass adoption of connected devices, and the continued evolution of discovery tools like Google, Pinterest, Bing, Yelp and more means customers have more ways than ever to discover, engage and transact with a brand. Developing a seamless customer experience and quicker path to conversion across these touchpoints is a new challenge for marketers — but we have a secret weapon.
The development of all this technology and the artificial intelligence that underlies it is retraining consumers to ask questions — specific, multi-word searches that clearly communicate the consumer's intent (aka long-tail keywords). Our customers are telling us exactly what they want to know, whether it's what vegetarian options are available at a restaurant, what the restaurant's hours are, or what ingredients are in the different vegetarian options available, to name a few examples.
The key to winning this shift is intent marketing. By analysing our traffic analytics and website performance, search data and search results page features, we can gain deep insight into what our customers want — and make sure they find our CMS-built experiences in their moment of intent, no matter where they're searching. And answering consumers' highly specific questions drives revenue: a study by Conductor found that conversion rates are 2.5x higher for long-tail keywords (like "nearest Burger King serving Impossible burger") than single-word searches ("burger").
How to Optimise CMS-Built Pages for Search Intent
Stay up to date with keyword research. Do your landing pages deliver what your customers are searching for? Common search modifiers include competitors, location, transactional keywords, informational terms and navigational keywords.
Develop pages and content for questions.
Consumers are asking questions about your products, services, providers, locations and your brand. You can find these questions in your search data and by analysing the content that ranks in organic search for your target terms. Building content around these questions and their answers on an FAQ page, product knowledge base or blog can drive increases in share of search results and organic traffic to your website.
- Update your reporting to uncover this behaviour — and socialise your success with internal stakeholders.
Across dashboards and reports, segment traffic and analytics to compare location pages, category pages, articles and other landing pages versus your homepage.
Implementing a winning intent marketing strategy at scale and getting the most value out of a CMS like Adobe Experience Manager requires a structured data solution. Structured data is key to surfacing in high-intent search results and to scaling both landing page creation and brand data management across third-party touchpoints. By helping search engines understand your content more accurately, and at a deeper level, you can increase your share of relevant search results and the likelihood of capturing a rich result. On your CMS pages that directly map to a specific feature in the SERP, such as local pages, event pages, or product pages, it's essential to leverage structured data so you can establish that connection with search engines and intelligent assistants.
Managing structured data empowers you to extend your CMS-built experience and make sure it speaks the same language as search engines and other discovery services across the digital ecosystem — more effectively answering consumer questions, owning vital SERP real estate and driving traffic and revenue.
Learn more about how to tailor your marketing strategies and tools to consumer intent in our eBookWhy Your Brand Needs to Be Answers-Ready: How to Win in the New Era of Search.
This post originally appeared on the Adobe Blog with the title Supercharge Your CMS With Intent Marketing.
