Hey there, and welcome back to AI on the Fly.
My name is Ryan Kelly, and I’m your host.
Today, I’m answering a question I was recently asked: how is user intent, or user search behavior, changing online? In other words, how are people changing the way they look for information on the internet?
For decades, search behavior was about using as few keystrokes or thumb presses as possible to get results. People would type short phrases like “furnace repair near me” because that was the fastest way to surface content and start making an informed decision.
Those days are changing.
Now search behavior looks very different. People are asking much longer, more detailed questions, such as who offers furnace repairs in Sonoma County, California, within ten miles of a specific address and has at least a four-star rating on Yelp or Google. Instead of minimizing keystrokes, users are being highly specific.
People are no longer just searching. They are using semantic language. They are adding conditions, preferences, and qualifiers. They are speaking to their phones and typing into their computers the way they would talk to another person.
In the past, long-tail keywords were part of SEO campaigns, but they were often treated as a smaller subset of the overall strategy. Today, those long-tail keywords have effectively become prompt phrases.
A prompt phrase is a question. It is typically more than three or four words, and it reflects a specific interest, inquiry, or topic. These prompts give far more context about what someone actually wants.
So the real question becomes this: if search behavior is shifting away from short phrases like “furnace repair near me” and toward detailed, conversational prompts that include location, values, ratings, and preferences, what are you doing to target those prompts?
How are you adapting your content, messaging, and overall marketing strategy to reflect the way people are now asking questions? And how do you figure out what people are talking about in the first place? How do you identify the topics to write about and the questions to answer?
Those are the kinds of questions I’ll continue to cover in future episodes of AI on the Fly. Hopefully, this helps clarify how online search behavior is changing and why it matters.
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