Search Intent expanded

Sometimes your rankings fall not because of a Google update but because you lost search intent.

WHAT!! How do you lose search intent?

It's bound to happen over time, as an example not too long ago if you were to Google "streaming" the results would have been focused around water or data streaming.  But now you will get streaming services, movies, and series.  Because over time you can lose search intent.

Just like a tablet used to be a piece of stone but we all know what it is now.  It's the same thing with Hybrid it used to be a cross between different plants or animals.  Now the majority of the results are focused on Hybrid vehicles.

So it's important to at minimum Google your keywords and/or phrases to see what intent is behind them.  There are so many tools out there to assist with this including ChatGPT, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and pretty much almost every keyword research tool.

I have seen websites suffer because they failed to do any research on search intent.  Another thing I have seen happen is people believing an update hurt their rankings even though they followed all the rules and did everything right.  In the end, it was their website. It was built completely around a focus set of keywords that the intent changed on.  While this doesn't happen often it does happen.

I personally like to pillar my content by intent, some informational (knowledge), questions and answers, and of course the most important ones ready to buy/ready to hire such as "Industry Near Me" etc. 

You can also use tools 

Such as Cora, Pop, Surfer, or even using Ahrefs or SEMRush and having ChatGPT compare the ranking URLs to yours.  

The people who rank the best create the path not follow it.  This means while the top 10 this or that is easy to copy it's not going to stand out.  So finding your own path or originality goes a lot further than creating the 11 best etc.  It reminds me of the old 20-minute abs and everyone making it shorter and shorter 3-minute abs, but how far do we go?  Are you truly providing something more useful?  Because if the answer is no then you will always struggle off and on with rankings.