On fried eggs and intent
It’s easy to get too hung up on the specifics of ‘intent’. Here’s how I strip it back.
For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, when we examine ‘intent’, we’re looking at the reader’s intentions when they land on a piece of content.
Are they in the early stages of research?
Are they deep into comparing different products?
Are they ready to buy?
In content circles, you’ll most often see intent categorised as one of the following:
Informational
Commercial
Transactional
Navigational
This kind of simple way to box up content and keywords helps strategists and editors.
It’s another way to slice and dice the mix of content on their site, and (more or less) matches up with the marketing funnel, so they can check they’re hitting the right funnel depth mix.
It’s also another way to dig into what type of content is and isn’t working, and why.
So far, so good.
But I don’t think these terms are overly useful for writers, and I don’t think they belong on a brief. To my mind, they simultaneously overcomplicate and oversimplify the very essence of intent.
Because as a writer, I don’t think there’s any way to fit intent into neat boxes.
I think the only way is to take a holistic view of what you’re writing and the essential context – primary query, distribution channel(s), subject matter, etc – and ask yourself honestly: what is the most helpful thing for me to provide at this point?
When I worked as a content marketing manager, we used to have summer interns in our marketing team, and every year I’d run a session with them on writing long-form content for the web.
As part of this, I had a little exercise to cover intent.
Before the session, we reviewed three different online articles, all concerned with the frying of eggs:
This Good Food recipe: How to Fry an Egg
This Food 52 behemoth: The Absolute Best Way to Fry an Egg, According to 42 Tests
This Feel Good Foodie guide: How to Fry an Egg
Together, we discussed which was our favourite, which we trusted most, and which one we thought best served people searching ‘how to fry an egg’.
Most liked the Food 52 article the best.
As a lover of both eggs and words, I certainly do.
It opens with one of my favourite ever introductions, which deserves to be copied out here in full:
"The egg is one of the kitchen’s marvels, and one of nature’s," writes prolific food scientist Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, his 800-page opus on, obviously, food and cooking. Fifty-plus pages are dedicated to the humble egg, which is mentioned upwards of 1,000 times.
"The egg is one of the kitchen’s marvels, and one of nature’s," I hissed at my mother the other morning, when I caught her frying one without any fat, in an old stainless-steel pan.
"Look away!" she shrieked, contorting her body to block the stovetop.”
It sets up the article as one for the egg lovers, and it shimmers with life in the process.
And how about this for a featured image:
One thing’s for sure: I trust this author’s opinion on frying an egg.
But let’s go back to the query, ‘how to fry an egg’, and imagine who is googling this:
It’s the 11-year-old making his first breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day, and borrowing the family iPad to find instructions
It’s the sleep-deprived dad of the newborn baby who has temporarily forgotten his name, the planet he lives on, and how to fry an egg
It’s the uni student who just had a girl to stay and asked her (ironically) ‘how would you like your eggs in the morning?’, and she actually answered. (I say ask, he actually sort of half sang it, and is now reliving the pure embarrassment of that moment as he scrapes burnt bits off the toast, roots around in the fridge for his flatmate’s butter, and keeps a half an eye on the now-frying eggs.)
Three different readers, but the context is the same:
The toast is down, the bacon is spitting, the beans are bubbling, and people are hungry. There’s no time to wade through thousands of words to get the best fried egg.
At this point, any half-decent fried egg will do.
Simple, clear, concise instructions are what we need.
As for the hardcore foodies and egg purists looking to curl up with a long read on a Sunday, or procrastinate before opening their Slack on a Monday morning? Well, I can’t recommend the Food52 article enough.
(Better still, why not join the 322 people who have chimed in with their own favourite way to fry an egg in the comments, as though the existing 42 methods weren’t enough.)
800 words deep into this post, I’m wondering if I have actually stripped back the idea of intent, or just repeated the word egg until it doesn’t look real anymore. I suppose it was already a pretty weird word to begin with.
But I digress.
The next time you are outlining or briefing content, don’t forget to do The Fried Egg Test (which I may or may not have made up).
Lace up your reader’s trainers, slip into their sliders, clip clop in their stilettos and work out what they need from you. A bit of SERP sleuthing can help, but don’t lean on this entirely.
More depth, and more words, are not always best.
And in that spirit, I’ll wrap things up here.
