SEO: Determining Searcher Intent with Matt Bailey

Moving up in SEO ranking factors, addressing searcher intent is a low-dispute best practice.  Your page must engage.  And search engines are getting better at deciding what types of pages will best serve the searchers.  But how can we know what searchers are expecting?      Find out here in this impromptu interview with author-expert Matt Bailey, hands-on SEO, bestselling author and corporate trainer from SiteLogic.

This episode is  brought to you by: WordTracker. Reveal 1000s of long tail keywords using data from Google, Wordtracker, and Amazon. Visit wordtracker.com for more information.

The OMCP Online Marketing Best Practices Podcast is where top authors and industry leaders share authoritative best practices in online marketing which are covered by the OMCP standard, competencies, and exams.  This is an OMCP pilot program that may continue based on member interest and support. Stay subscribed to the OMCP newsletter to get new episodes.

Download your MP3 of “Determining Searcher Intent” here.

Determining Searcher Intent:

Michael: All right, welcome back to the OMCP Studio. And with us today is Matt Bailey, author, educator, and CEO of SiteLogic. Matt is at the forefront of digital marketing and best practices and training for some of the largest brands in the world. I’m your host Michael Stebbins, and today we’ll be discussing how to determine search intent for SEO and putting pages together. Matt, welcome to “OMCP’s Best Practices” podcast, thanks for being here.

Matt: Okay, thanks for the invitation and always fun to have a conversation with you. So, I’m looking forward to it.

Michael:  And we tend to go off on all kinds of fun tangents, we’ll allow for a little bit of that today, but we will convey some of the best practices for search intent. I know a lot of SEOs are struggling with this, trying to figure out, “What do I put on the page that allows me to rank?” And so much of it has to do with addressing searcher intent. But before we get into that, I just want our audience to know you are the author of “Internet Marketing: An Hour a Day,” published by Wiley Sybex. I know, [because]  was grateful to be the technical editor on that. And that was fun.

Matt: Yes.

Michael: And then, you have a new book out. And I believe that is …walk me through because I always get it backwards, right?

Matt: “Teach New Dogs Old Tricks.”

Michael: Okay, good. And that is available at Amazon?

Matt: Yes.

Michael: And if I remember right, this goes to the core of how sales training actually helped build out a digital marketing industry for you.

Matt: Absolutely.

Michael: It allowed you to help people. And there’s a lot of insights in there. Give us a quick synopsis.

Matt: Quick synopsis. So we’re going to talk about searcher intent?

Michael: Yep.

Searcher Intent and Why It Matters — beyond SEO

Matt: And one of the things I learned in sales is how to drill down to what people really need. Listening to the words they say. And it’s the concept of mirroring. So, if you are telling me, “Matt, what I’m really looking for is I want a phone that does these things. Cost is a consideration. And this is what I’m looking for.” What I learned from that is I’m going to repeat the highlights of what you said, and when I present it I’m gonna ask you, “Does it look good?” Because you used language that says you’re more visual because you said,