To my knowledge, this is a topic that I haven’t seen covered in the SEO community, but I never really gave much thought to writing about the idea until I mentioned it in a Loom training that I made for one of my SEO colleagues. After I recorded the video, he told me how much he liked the video and that some of the things in there he’d never heard before.
So I went to Google and I tried to figure out if the idea of hidden search intent had been covered. Turns out, Bernard Huang (mad respect to Bernard, btw) wrote a piece about hidden search intent here, which was very well done. However, the semantics of what Bernard was describing didn’t match my definition of hidden search intent. It’s such an obscure topic that I think his definition is equally valid, but it seems to me like this would be worth covering, as it helped our team build our best-performing article, which happened to outrank PayPal for the keyword, “PayPal international fees.”
Before I continue, I just want to say that I’m not attempting to “one up” Bernard’s ideas, which actually fold very well into my personal definition. This is just my own unique little discovery that I want to share with the community.
Here’s how that happened.
In late 2019, I was researching keyword opportunities for our team and prioritizing them in our content production queue, a standard practice for our content-based approach to SEO as a SaaS organization. One of the keyword opportunities that I dug into was “paypal international fees.”
I noticed that the topic is one that has unusually high search volume (higher than I would have guessed, anyway). And, even though the keyword appeared to be competitive, I felt that we had a good chance of making it to page one, so I proceeded to try and get the piece ready for my writers by analyzing the SERP, learning what I could about the search intents, and coming up with a catchy title/direction for the article.
Most SEOs who work with content are familiar with this very standard SERP analysis process, so I won’t be covering all of the angles I look for during my SERP analysis process. In a nutshell, my goals are always:
- To understand what the users’ goals are (intents) when performing a search for “paypal international fees.”
- To understand which domains/pages are being favored on page one, what their page titles are, and how their content maps to the users’ goals.
- Then, to form our own page title (topic) in a way that can compete on page one by touching on the searchers’ intent and doing it in a way that helps us stand apart from the crowd. In other words, finding a unique angle that helps our content stand out from other articles.
In essence, one of the ways I try to set up the piece for success, is to create a title that can uniquely stand out against the pages that are already ranking, while also remaining aligned as closely as possible to the goal(s) of that particular keyword’s search audience.
For this keyword, I noticed that the articles were writing about two primary intents.
- What are PayPal’s international fees? (informational intent / definition)
- How to calculate international fees with PayPal (transactional intent / calculator)
All of the articles at the time of my research were some variation of the same two search intents listed above (“What are PayPal’s international fees” or “How to calculate PayPal’s international fees.”
It would have been easy enough to copy their styles and write another variation of the same, but I started to think more about what searchers might respond to in this situation, which made me realize that all of the articles I was analyzing had been overlooking something that the searchers were likely to be experiencing (even though they weren’t saying it in words). Namely, how much it sucks to pay international money transfer fees.
I decided we should test out this theory and launch the article with this theme in mind. Note, that it’s the second half of this title that captures the hidden search intent.
What are PayPal’s International Fees & How to Avoid them
I wasn’t 100% certain about my theory, but I thought that if we could tap into that pain point that people are experiencing when they’re in the process of researching PayPal’s international fees, then maybe we could stand out from the crowd and compete on page one.
In other words, the desire for people not to have to pay fees was a hidden search intent because there were no explicit indicators in the SERPs, related searches, or inputs that could clue me in. I was merely making a guess by putting myself in the position of the users’ experiences.
What happened after we launched that article was a very positive confirmation of the theory.
(For privacy reasons, I’ve removed the hard numbers from this graph.)
The article rose to position #1 for “paypal international fees,” outranking PayPal’s own page. Even now, we still get more traffic from that page than any other article that we’ve produced (barring the homepage traffic).
Fast-forward to today, the SERP looks very different. A couple of core updates later, and now Google is preferring PayPal’s fees page over ours. Plus, we’re seeing several new pieces following suit with our theme, which today is not so hidden anymore.
The good news for us is that the success of this piece seems to have helped us maintain our competitive edge and we still rank #2 (next to PayPal) which I believe can be credited to the positive signals that we’ve built with the piece as a result of being first to address the hidden search intent.
How to optimize for hidden search intent
If I had to guess how many search queries are out there with secret, untapped search intents, I would think that the percentages are quite low. The internet’s massive content library (and the SEO pieces within it) have grown to encompass and address the correct angles of searcher intent for the majority of high-volume terms like this one.
But definitely not all.
And, even for the terms that have been covered in great detail, I strongly believe that there are plenty of opportunities to create an angle that no one else has touched.
So then, how do you optimize for hidden intent?
Well, the first, and trickiest part is learning how to spot when a keyword has underlying search intent that has not yet been fulfilled.
Playing this game is a lot like being on a date with someone who bottles their emotions inside of them. You’re pretty sure that their words don’t match their feelings, but you’ve got to guess what exactly it is that they want without them telling you what they want.
Beyond that, the search intent can’t have already been covered by other articles, as was the case with “how to avoid PayPal’s international fees” when we launched our article.
Last but not least, the hidden search intent must be powerful enough that it will strike a chord with the vast majority of searchers who are performing searches on that term. It’s no use optimizing for a hidden intent that only 5% of the people want to know about because that means you’ve optimized your article for such a small fraction of the users that the majority won’t find engaging, and you’ll find that your content will struggle to compete in the search results.
Conclusion
Hidden search intent, if you haven’t heard about it, or thought about it, appears to have been an extremely successful method of building high-performing content. The only challenge is that it’s getting more and more rare to find keywords where the key pain points, emotions, and intents of users have not already been covered by someone else online.
Bernard’s definition of hidden search intent (if I had to guess) is very similar to mine, except that I’ve tried to narrow the idea even further to disqualify keywords where the underlying intent has already been covered by another page in the SERPs. I might define that instead as “inexplicit search intent” because inexplicit search intent is one that other articles or pages have already covered, yet takes a little bit of digging to discover as Bernard’s article points out.
Semantics are a tricky thing, so however you prefer to define things, the real key to optimizing for these hidden or inexplicit search intents is all about stepping into the users’ frame of mind and getting in touch with what they might be thinking, feeling, or experiencing during their search process.
