Creating a Content Strategy Based On Emotional Search Intent (To Get Better Leads)
When it comes to connecting with your target audience through your content strategy, few agents know where to start. Most of them put everyone in the same bucket and assume they all want to know about the latest market information and sales trend information.
And while that might work for a generic audience, it doesn’t work if you’re trying to build a content strategy that truly resonates and connects with your ideal target audience at just the right time for just the right reasons. That’s where search intent comes in.
Search intent is the understanding, and planning for, the why, when, and how around how your target audience searches to find your website and your content. It’s one of the most important parts of writing content that connects and converts.
But capitalizing on search intent goes beyond just understanding what someone would search for. You also need to understand the why that goes along with their search, and the more you can understand their situation, the better. That’s where emotional search intent can help.
What Is Emotional Search Intent?
Emotional search intent starts with truly understanding your target audience and being able to put yourself in their place while they’re searching for something, at the exact time and conditions they’re searching. If you plan your emotional intent strategy correctly, it can help you attract the exact type of people you want to work with.
For example, if part of your target audience is people going through a divorce, you should start by thinking about what they’d actually be looking for help with. You might assume that someone in the early stages of a divorce who will eventually need to sell their home will look for a top agent in their area. And while they might eventually do that, there are probably a lot of searches that will come well before that, primarily based on someone looking for the answer to a question at an emotional time.
That’s where the opportunity lies. If it’s real estate related, their early searches will probably be things like:
- Who keeps the home in a divorce?
- What to know about selling your house in a divorce?
- Do I need one agent or two when selling my house in a divorce?
- If selling a home in a divorce, do you contact a lawyer or agent first?
These are emotional searches where people are looking for answers to real estate related questions before they’re looking for an agent. If your content is positioned to be there for them at the right time, you can get that person to trust you, your brand, and your business, and eventually, connect with you when the time does come to sell their home.
★ Want to learn more about building content around your target audience? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Long-Tail Real Estate Keyword Strategy
- Carving a Niche to Get Better Real Estate Leads
- Why Defining Your Target Audience Is the Most Important Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Emotional Search Intent Creates an Opportunity to Help
One of the most valuable aspects of building a content strategy around emotional search intent is that, if done correctly, you’ll actually be able to help people and make a difference in their lives at a difficult time, and build a relationship in the process.
For example, if someone’s parent recently died, and they’re sitting in front of the computer trying to figure out how to tackle 50 years of personal items and family history, they probably aren’t going to be looking for who’s the best agent in the top 1% of agents in their market. They’re going to be looking for help, and they’re going to be looking for answers to complicated questions.
You need to be able to put yourself in their situation and figure out what they’d be searching for, and then plan your content strategy around it. They might be searching for things like:
- How to deal with the family home when your parents are deceased.
- How to sell a parent’s home when they are deceased.
- What do you do when you need to sell the family home?
If they find your content, and it answers their question, you begin to build trust. And helping someone through a difficult transaction at an emotional time doesn’t just build trust; it generates the kind of referrals that no marketing campaign can replicate. Someone will likely recommend an agent who helped them sell their home for above asking in a difficult market, but they’ll consistently give rave reviews to an agent who also helped them navigate a difficult and emotional time in their life.
Emotional search intent is about being there for your target audience at the moment they need help the most. That’s what builds the kind of trust that turns a stranger into a client, and a client into someone who refers you for years.
How Emotional Search Intent Connects to Your Broader Strategy
Emotional search intent is one of the strongest foundations for building a topic ownership strategy. When you understand the emotional reasons behind how your target audience searches, you can build entire content clusters around those situations, covering every question someone might have at each stage of their experience.
For example, the divorce example above isn’t just one blog post. It’s a topic cluster: property division, selling the family home, what happens to the mortgage, working with lawyers, navigating co-ownership, and more. Each post answers a different emotional search intent question, and together they create a body of work that positions you as the authority on that topic.
The same applies to AI search. When someone asks an AI platform a question like “what do I do with my parent’s house after they pass away,” the AI platform looks for content that thoroughly and empathetically answers that question from a credible source. Content built around emotional search intent, with genuine depth and real understanding of the situation, is exactly the kind of content AI platforms are designed to find and cite.
Emotional search intent gives you a framework for building content that connects with people, builds trust, and positions you as an authority, across traditional search, AI search, and every other place where your target audience is looking for answers.
★ Want to learn more about topic ownership and building for AI search? Have a look at these posts:
- Switching Your SEO Strategy from Keyword Matching to Topic Ownership to Get Better Leads
- Why You Should Establish a Topic Cluster Strategy
- Building an Answers Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategy for AI
Content That Connects and Converts
By creating content around your target audience’s emotional search intent, and being found at the right time, you’ll begin to build trust with people because you’ve helped them. When it comes time to choose an agent, if you’ve made a big enough impact, they’re likely to reach out to you first.
Want to improve your content strategy? Download our Content Strategy Guide for Real Estate Agents. It has practical methods on how to plan, implement, market, and audit a successful real estate content strategy that will deliver results as part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
