Chris Dickey Reveals What Most Brands Don’t Know About Search Intent

Yeah. Intent is super important. If you’re building a content strategy and not factoring in intent, you could be creating the wrong content for what Google wants to show in the SERP. It won’t rank, even if you’ve got domain authority and backlinks. If your content is transactional and Google wants to show informational content, you won’t be there.

To break it down further, Google and other search engines have advanced natural language processing that determines what kind of content a user wants to see. They’ll populate videos, images, ecommerce results, whatever. But there are three main types of intent: click to buy, click to learn, and click to go. In SEO terms, that’s transactional, informational, and navigational.

Informational is when someone wants to learn—they’re asking questions, reading reviews, not ready to buy. Transactional is when someone’s ready to purchase. Google will elevate places to buy, not reviews. And click to go is like when you already know what you want but you don’t know the URL—like if someone searches “animal shelter Sacramento.” You’re not shopping around—you just want to get to that site.

At Visably, we’ve built a more advanced way to determine intent. We’ve indexed millions of domains as ecommerce, brand-owned, PR, and so on. And we actually even split that down into brand-owned transactional and brand-owned informational. Like, we can drill in on, say, a brand-owned blog, for instance, and identify that it’s an informational source. And then say, the place on the same website where you buy stuff—that’s transactional. So we look at all this stuff, and then we make a judgment based on the aggregate tags we’ve associated with all these websites.

And intent is going to be a spectrum. It’s not going to be perfect—like, oh, everything’s informational or everything’s transactional—it’s a spectrum. And we just provide that spectrum. It’s like, where does the SERP lean—informational or transactional?

We don’t assume many of our clients are “click-to-go” people. That’s just not a search that, as a marketer, you’d be interested in, because that customer’s already spoken for. They already know where they want to go. You want to get in front of the customers who are still open-minded about their purchase decision.

I think it’s just important to know which department is in charge of which keywords, right? So, in our case as an agency—before we had Visably built—we would have to manually audit all these search results to identify which keywords had a lot of opportunity for PR and which ones didn’t. And we’d just have to bucket it that way.

And it’s not like transactional stuff—there’s a whole team that works on that. There’s a sales team, an e-commerce team, and even entire agencies now that just manage your relationship with Amazon or whoever. And there’s a whole strategy around how you merchandise yourself within these platforms, where there are literally hundreds of thousands—or millions—of competing products. So there’s a whole SEO game just within Amazon.

But I think it’s worth it for these e-commerce managers to start thinking about incoming traffic—not just traffic that already exists on Amazon, but the traffic that Amazon is winning from search. And from the few conversations I’ve had with e-commerce agencies, nobody is really looking at that. And it could be really game-changing for that industry if they started targeting the way someone comes into the site—the landing page and that first touchpoint as they come into Amazon, or REI, or Lowe’s, or Home Depot.

I think there’s a couple of different ways we can do it. Unfortunately, there’s not a perfect full-funnel strategy out there. We’re working on it, but we haven’t developed it yet.

A couple things—number one, I think click attribution is a big one. Just understanding how many people clicked on content or links that include your content or talk about your brand. That’s a no-BS way of measuring audience and reach.

Number two, once you understand the click attribution, you can determine equivalent ad value for those clicks. There’s a CPC for every single keyword out there, right? So if we understand how many people clicked on your stuff, we can say, “Okay, if you were going to buy these clicks, here’s what you would’ve paid for them.” It’s not like print advertising, which is kind of the Wild West when it comes to figuring out what you’re paying for.

And then lastly, especially if it’s not your own website showing up—say it’s a third-party site—affiliate links are really big right now and really important within PR. If you’re going to win a review, you might as well tell them where to buy it. And if you’re going to do that, set them up with a link that’s tracking that click-through rate. Then you can really start measuring full-funnel ROI. If you’re improving your merchandising on a specific e-commerce partner, you can measure that. If it ends up being your own website, even better. You can definitely measure that.

That affiliate thing was how we started recognizing the power of these hits showing up in search. Our clients would come back to us and say, “These websites are just crushing it—they’re sending us so many customers. What’s going on?”

And sure enough, we’d reverse engineer what’s going on, and they’re ranking for a top search term. That was the initial kind of dinner bell—like, “Oh man, something’s going off here.” And then we realized it was all search.

Why are these two websites millions of customers? Millions is a little overstatement, but thousands of customers. Yeah.

There’s all sorts of interesting things you can do once you have this data, and we’re looking deeper into all the domains within the search results. I think a couple things I’d like to do—without giving away too many secrets—we’re going to start getting a lot of data on various keywords and which websites are showing up, how often, and across what searches.

So from a media planning perspective, the tool we’re trying to build would let you type in a new category you’re planning to launch in—say, again, Peak Design and bags—and Visably would infer a bunch of related keywords. Then we’d look through the history of our crawling and populate the top 20 publishers that show up most frequently for those keywords. It would help you plan media buys, PR outreach, all that—really building your list based on search performance.

Another thing, a little further down the line but very much on our radar, is: how do we better advise a brand manager on how to spend and allocate budget to maximize their footprint in search?

A big question on my mind is, how do you measure or balance bidding strategy against organic visibility? If you have strong organic visibility in the SERP, do you still want to be bidding on that keyword? Someone’s already likely to find you. Or should you reallocate toward keywords where your organic visibility is weaker?

Same goes for evaluating opportunities—what’s better suited for SEO, what’s better suited for PR. So, getting granular, getting smart with it, and ideally doing it all automatically. Giving you keyword strategy, keyword by keyword, and telling you who’s responsible for what—how to align teams to build really dominant strategies in search.

A place that’s high on my radar—and man, there are so many amazing places, I love to travel—but it’s Chile and Argentina, Patagonia. I’m a climber, I love that stuff. Some of it’s probably over my head, but there are plenty of mountains I could get up. That’s a place I’d love to spend some time.

Oh man, I’m gonna be a little mundane on this one and say I’d love to be a better musician. I know that’s not really a superpower, but people who do that—amazing musicians—I’m so jealous. Getting in front of a crowd and being able to rock would be a lot of fun.

And singer-songwriters in particular—I just love it.

Totally. I can play the guitar—not very well. I don’t sing. If I could tie it all together, that’d be awesome.

The agency is purpleorangepr.com. We’re a boutique agency—we mostly specialize in active lifestyle consumer brands.

Visably, V-I-S-A-B-L-Y, is a play on the word “visibility.” That’s just info@visably.com, and that’ll find its way to me—or close to me. And I’m on LinkedIn, Chris Dickey, D-I-C-K-E-Y.

Hey, thanks for the opportunity. Super excited for it to come out. Let me know when it drops, and we’ll push it through our channels too.