Build a Search Intent Dashboard to Unlock Better Opportunities

This dashboard is now a Swiss Army knife of data that allows you to slice and dice to your heart’s content. Below are a couple of examples of how I use this dashboard to uncover opportunities and insights for my clients.

Where are competitors winning?

With this data, we can quickly identify the top competing domains, but what’s more valuable is identifying the competitors for a particular intent stage and category.

I start by filtering to the “Informational” stage since it represents the most keywords in our dataset. I also filter to the top category for this intent stage which is “Blinds.” Looking at my Keyword Count card, I can now see that I’m looking at a subset of 641 keywords.

Note: To filter multiple visuals in Power BI, you need to press and hold the “Ctrl” button each time you click a new visual to maintain all the filters you clicked previously.

The top competing subdomain here is videos.blinds.com with visibility in the top 20 for over 250 keywords, most of which are for video results. I hit ctrl+click on the Video results portion of videos.blinds.com to update the keywords table to only keywords where videos.blinds.com is ranking in the top 20 with a video result.

From all this, I can now say that videos.blinds.com is ranking in the top 20 positions for about 30 percent of keywords that fall into the “Blinds” category and the “Informational” intent stage. I can also see that most of the keywords here start with “how to,” which tells me that most likely, people searching for blinds in an informational stage are looking for how-to instructions and that video may be a desired content format.

Where should I focus my time?

Whether you’re in-house or at an agency, time is always a hit commodity. You can use this dashboard to quickly identify opportunities that you should be prioritizing first — opportunities that can guarantee you’ll deliver bottom-line results.

To find these bottom-line results, we’ll filter our data using the PPC conversions slicer so that it only includes keywords that have converted at least once in our PPC campaigns.

Once I do that, I can see I’m working with a pretty limited set of keywords that have been bucketed into intent stages. However, I can continue by drilling into the “Transactional” intent stage because I want to target queries linked to a possible purchase.

Note: Not every keyword will fall into an intent stage if it doesn’t meet the criteria we set. These keywords will still appear in the data, but this is the reason why your total keyword count might not always match the total keyword count in the intent stages or category tables.

From there, I want to focus on those “Transactional” keywords that are triggering answer boxes to make sure I have good visibility since they are converting for me on PPC. To do that, I filter to only show keywords triggering answer boxes. Based on these filters, I can look at my keyword table and see most (if not all) of the keywords are “installation” keywords, and I don’t see my client’s domain in the top list of competitors. This is now an area of focus for me to start driving organic conversions.

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