Search intent and the organic funnel — Whiteboard Friday
So when we start searching for information at the top of the funnel, these are people who aren’t necessarily thinking about converting, not even necessarily at an early stage.
They just want information. They may be trying to answer a simple or complex question. What we notice at this stage of the funnel, and you may have noticed this too, is that there is less and less space for traditional organic search. Often times, you’ll see a big feature at the top, like a featured snippet or a knowledge graph, some sort of custom results, and right below that you’ll see a “People also ask.”
On many screens, that’s already the entire area above the fold. So this is the search intent with the lowest organic voice share of all the intents I’m going to talk about today. Right now, organic voice share is at 43.6%. Yeah, I would say that’s lower than any of the others.
As I said, there are multiple ways to measure share of voice. We obviously look at volume and position on the SERPs or how dominant the organic is compared to other features. But any way you look at it, that’s a low number. So if you want to play in that space, you can filter your keyword research to look for informational intent plus organic position one, because there are still some cases where that’s the case, or maybe if there’s a featured snippet, you can look to see if it’s possible to actually win that featured snippet.
So if you want to refine your keyword research, you should make sure that the keywords have some kind of informational intent and that there is something organic that appears in position one, because there are still cases where that happens. Also, of course, I’m talking about featured snippets. You can win with featured snippets. Whether you think it’s worth it, I would say it’s worth it, just for the impression.
I think as SEOs we often forget the value of impressions as opposed to clicks. But I would say it’s worth competing for. However, in some cases you have to weigh up whether it’s worth the effort, because of course it’s never guaranteed.