My team and I have - once again - spent an entire week auditing a site that has focused on creating tons of content, that got them tons of traffic - just to find out they were now losing
- relevance
- leads
- and revenue.
I get it!
It's an amazing feeling to see traffic graphs skyrocket after creating a lot of content.
But:
Can we acknowledge that an inflated ego doesn't help grow a business?
Earlier this year I got really sick of it.
So, I asked Branko, our developer here at SEOLeverage, to visualize a new KPI in our app:
High intent.
We track this in absolute values and percentages.
Check out this example:
Example of a KPI overview showing traffic, conversions and high-intent %
The site has been growing in traffic until November / December, based on seasonality, traffic went down. At the same time, though, November was a peak in conversions, followed by a peak in high-intent visitors the month afterwards.
This brand has told us they're having a crazy month in December with lots of new clients, many enquiries about pricing and RFPs - most likely from the previous 2 months of high opt-ins.
But what turns your average user on your site into a high-intent visitor?
Tracking visitor intent
We track their behavior and define key moments that would tell us that this user isn't just an information browser, tire kicker, or newbie searching for a definition.
And then we track those moments as conversions (key events in Google Analytics 4) and import them into our app:
This leads to a series of exceptional findings:
- which pages bring people to your site who check out your offer
- which pages get tons of traffic but no high-intent engagement at all
- which pages get great high-intent metrics but could do much better with more traffic
- which pages only drive high intent but never close a typical conversion
At scale, our app is now able to find out across hundreds of URLs, which ones are the ones that drive the highest intent - and which keywords are the ones that drive the most traffic to them. (Gert Mellak)
Lead metrics vs. lag metrics
Now after a few months of having high-intent tracking in place, we are also seeing additional patterns evolve:
- positive high-intent metrics are very often leading indicators of high conversion rates
- a downtrend in high-intent can be an indicator to double down across all channels to soften the likely downward trend in conversions.
Customer journeys can take a few weeks, if not months. Having additional, high-intent tracking in place will shift your focus to the level of engagement with your offer and brand, rather than to immediate sales:
- A Google Ads campaign not driving sales but tons of high-intent traffic might still have a positive ROI, just a bit later
- A campaign on Meta that does not drive high-intent at all might not need to be kept up for too long, which will help you save in budget.
- Only generate articles on topics that drive high-intent visitors from organic search engines and consider dropping the ones that don't.
ROI vs. High-Intent focus
Let's be honest here - it's almost impossible to make an ethically correct, serious forecast in SEO - there are just too many variables.
And don't get me started on what you can do with search volume data, expected CTRs, etc. I've done those reports as well to illustrate my plans to clients here and there, but you and I know that while it's good to see this work out on paper, the reality is mostly very different!
BUT:
High-intent tracking will allow you to quickly find out if your content marketing works - and allow you to fine-tune even before you have completed - or a lack of - purchase information.
So, rather than trying to produce an impossible and often made-up forecast, let's set our strategy up so we can react fast to real data coming in.
With high-intent data you will quickly know whether the traffic you are driving in across all channels is, in fact, the traffic that will actually grow your brand and drive more sales in the future.
Best,
Gert