Search Intent and the Organic Funnel — Whiteboard Friday

So, starting at the top of the funnel, with informational search, this is people who are not necessarily even thinking anything to do with a conversion, not even at an early stage necessarily.

They just want information. They might be trying to answer a simple or complex question. Now, what we notice at this stage of the funnel, and you might have noticed this as well, is there’s increasingly little space for traditional organic. Often, you’ll get a big feature at the top, like a featured snippet or a knowledge graph, sort of custom results, and then directly beneath that, you’ll get a “People Also Ask.”

On a lot of screens, that’s already the entire above-the-fold space. So this is the search intent with the lowest share of voice for organic of any of the intents I’m going to talk about today. It’s 43.6% organic share of voice right now. Yeah, I’d say that’s lower than any of the others.

Like I said, there’s a few ways you can measure share of voice. We’re obviously looking at volume and position on the SERPs or how dominant the organic is compared to other features. But however you cut it, this is a low number. So in terms of what you can look for if you are trying to play in this space, you can filter your keyword research to sort of look for informational intent plus position one organic because there are still some cases where that exists, or perhaps when there is a featured snippet, you can look at whether it’s possible to actually win that featured snippet.

So, what you should be looking for in terms of honing in your keyword research here is sort of informational intent plus something organic appearing in position one, because there are still some cases where that happens. Also, obviously, I talk about featured snippets. Featured snippets are winnable. Whether you think that’s worthwhile, I would suggest that is worthwhile if only for the impression.

I think, as SEOs, we often forget the value of impressions as opposed to clicks. But I would say it is worth trying to compete for these. But in some cases, you might have to make that equation in terms of whether the effort is going to be worthwhile because, of course, it’s never guaranteed anyway.