What is Hidden Search Intent? How to spot it and optimize for it

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.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is an abbreviation of my complete article on hidden search intent. You can check out the full piece here https://loganbryant.com/what-is-hidden-search-intent/

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.