ByJohn Hall

ByJohn Hall,
Senior Contributor.
Business meeting reviewing their success metrics.
In today’s digital age, SEO isn’t an optional marketing strategy. It’s essential. However, many business leaders don’t understand the key research components needed to run a successful SEO campaign. All too often, I see companies choose target keywords based on gut feeling without having conducted the proper research. This approach causes businesses to invest time and resources into ranking for a keyword that won’t impact their bottom line.
Instead of guessing what keywords will advance your marketing goals, choose target keywords based on robust research. Search intent and keyword research are vital to a successful SEO campaign. Keyword research provides insights into what questions, phrases and words your target audience is searching on Google. Search intent research takes these findings a step further and explores the main goal your customers have when they’re Googling a topic.
When companies use both keyword and search intent research as part of their SEO strategy, they’re more likely to hit their SEO marketing goals. However, it can be challenging to know how to implement your findings if this is your first time making the attempt. Here are five ways to use intent and keyword research to level up your SEO efforts.
As with most things in life, getting started often feels like the hardest part. But with SEO, the initial step is pretty simple. When you begin the research process, create a list of topics related to your business. For example, if you operate a veterinary clinic, you may list “large pet health” and “small pet health” as two topic clusters.
Once you’ve established the topic clusters that are most important to your business, identify specific keywords that fall under each cluster. In the veterinary clinic example, specific keywords might include “vaccinations for dogs,” “nutrition for cats” and “yearly care for horses.”
To get insights into which keywords your audience is searching for and which ones competitors rank for, you’ll need the help of SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs. These programs inform you of the monthly search volume of each word. The higher the monthly search volume, the more interested your audience is in the topic.
Keyword research can also highlight areas where your competitors are ranking that you aren’t, identifying gaps in your content strategy. However, keywords with a high monthly search volume are typically harder to rank for. So depending on your budget, it may be more beneficial to target a related keyword with fewer monthly searches.
Companies with sites that have a high domain authority have an easier time ranking for competitive keywords than companies with a lower domain authority. That’s why you’ll often see that larger organizations rank on page one of Google search for popular terms.
If you’re a smaller organization with a lower site authority, this can feel disheartening. However, there’s far less competition to rank for lower-volume search terms. Therefore, targeting relevant words and phrases with fewer monthly searches may increase your chances of making it to page one of Google search.
Once you’ve chosen your target keywords, it’s important to identify how they relate to your users’ search intent. Search intent falls into four primary categories: informational, preferential, transactional and navigational.
Users searching informational terms are seeking general information about a subject. People looking up preferential terms are investigating brands and products. Users Googling transactional terms are ready to make a purchase, while people searching navigational terms want to be taken to a specific site. Understanding the user intent of a target keyword can help you identify the types of content you need to create in order to rank for that term.
High-growth companies include keyword-optimized onsite content as a cornerstone of their SEO strategy. By creating content that caters to their target audience’s search intent and organically includes target keywords, they can attract new customers by providing value. Examples of the types of content you may want to offer include engaging blog posts, in-depth articles, educational guides and informative white papers.
Entertaining, inspiring and educating your customers is the best way to keep them coming back to your site. However, there’s a ton of competition in the field of content marketing. If you want to stay relevant, it’s essential that you regularly create and distribute your content.
Digital marketing is a competitive landscape. It’s no longer enough to simply create content without a strategy or end goal in mind. Failing to prioritize SEO means your competition will always outrank you in Google search, winning the attention of your target audience. But by conducting keyword research and considering your audience’s search intent, you can create compelling resources that attract searchers and turn prospects into loyal customers.

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MarTech » Marketing artificial intelligence (AI) » If your teams aren’t ready for AI, then your tools won’t matter
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Many companies are trying to implement AI transformation — but most stall because the focus is on technology, not of people. Successful transformation requires rethinking roles, processes and mindsets across the organization.
AI transformation goes beyond technology. Although AI is already part of daily life for people and companies, it is a big step from using AI to transforming your team, department or company. It requires thinking big and reimagining how you conduct business.
You must look across teams and functions to rewrite processes, boundaries and roles. For example:
AI transformation requires asking people what parts of their responsibilities — and for some, what parts of their identity — can be replaced with machine learning.
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After leading large-scale digital transformations and as a career coach, I’ve learned that the hardest challenge with transformation isn’t the technology — it’s the people.
An organization-wide change requires mindset shifts, time and realignment at every level. Some people will see this as a threat to their job, identity or career path, making everything much more difficult. To make it easier, you need your most skilled team members to help lead the way. Here’s how to bring them along for the ride.
Dig deeper: AI transformation: How to prepare your marketing team
Be honest about what you need to achieve. Given the economic climate, you must be transparent whether you’re a team leader aiming to drive efficiencies or your company wants to reduce operating expenses.
Most employees expect AI to be part of the future and know it has the potential to change what they do and how it gets done. Being upfront builds trust. All your employees will appreciate the clarity, and the driven ones will likely offer help.
It will also show you who has genuine interest in the program and who doesn’t. Volunteers often come with ideas you haven’t considered and early concerns about planned changes. Even if you move forward despite those concerns, that insight will be valuable later.
Finally, when explaining the “why” behind the need for change, include the risks of not changing. If teams believe the current state is the safest or best option, they will need to understand your compelling alternative before embracing it.
Employee engagement is a leading cause of transformation failure, so you must share more than just the “why.” Communicate detailed change plans broadly, even if they don’t yet affect everyone. Include:
Transparency builds trust. Use multiple communication channels, as people get information in different ways: FAQs, meetings, internal sites, videos, lunch and learns, office hours and more. 
More is better than not enough. Repeat key messages regularly. People will need to hear essential points multiple times before they sink in.
Whenever possible, explain the benefits of the change for specific groups. Your employees are more likely to embrace change when they understand its benefits.
Dig deeper: 4 ways to achieve early wins with AI in marketing
Lasting change comes from employee involvement and buy-in. As mentioned earlier, participation surfaces potential issues. More importantly, it increases engagement and reduces resistance.
When people feel included and heard, they’re more likely to commit to the project’s success. Consider small workshops, feedback on demos or asking teams to recommend areas where AI could help.
Because complete transformations take time, identify quick wins that showcase success and team involvement. Have pilot teams share their experiences:
These build momentum. Celebrate wins, highlight contributions and recognize leadership. Employees who see their peers praised for engaging are more likely to get involved.
Even with the best transformation plan, change is hard for most people. Don’t ignore, minimize or dismiss employees’ fears. Address rumors early and clarify any misunderstandings before they spread. If you don’t plan to reduce jobs, say so. If you need to in the future, be upfront about that as well.
Be transparent, empathetic and offer support. The more support you provide, the more confident your team will feel during the transition.
Dig deeper: How to build AI strategies that prioritize people
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
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Today beauty trends move fast. A moisturizer that’s hot among Generation Z one month is cold the next and The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (ELC), one of the world’s best-known names in beauty, needs to move even faster.  
So The Estée Lauder Companies turned to Microsoft 365 Copilot for a boost. Together, the partners are building a generative AI ecosystem, with Copilot Studio, Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search, to gather data, identify trends, build marketing assets, inform research and generally move moisturizers, lip glosses and makeup to market faster.  
Estée Lauder has been in business for nearly 80 years and can call on a wealth of consumer data, such as surveys, clinical trials, promotions and product usage. Its ConsumerIQ, an agent built in Copilot Studio, will place that consumer data – one of its greatest competitive advantages – at the fingertips of employees.  
With ConsumerIQ, Estée Lauder can respond rapidly to the fickle tastes of consumers. A marketing director, for example, won’t waste time searching for a customer survey or worse, creating a report that already exists. Instead, they’ll use natural language prompts to ask ConsumerIQ to find what they need.  
Say an influencer is raving about an organic lip gloss on TikTok. A marketing team can tap into the company’s decades of data to learn how customers use lip gloss in markets around the world. Then they can market one of their own, like Blooming Shine Nourishing Lip Glaze from ELC’s sustainable Origins brand, or develop a new one. 
“This is now as simple as asking a question and getting an answer,” says Jayesh Mehta, a brand technology leader at Estée Lauder and a member of its AI Task Force. “Bringing the information (to) the fingertips as opposed to waiting for somebody to go research and bring that output three days later.” 
It’s part of Estée Lauder’s broader corporate vision, Beauty Reimagined, to make the company leaner, faster and more agile. Early on, leaders recognized the role AI, and specifically Microsoft Copilot and agents, could play in the drive for transformative innovation, bold efficiencies and a reimagination of how ELC works. 
Put simply, with Microsoft’s help Estée Lauder is leveraging the speed and power of AI to help drive change and growth. And there’s a lot at stake. Generative AI’s impact could generate $9 billion to $10 billion in the beauty industry around the globe, McKinsey & Company reported in January 2025. 
“Generative AI represents a significant opportunity for the beauty industry – creating more engaging customer experiences, getting products into the hands of consumers faster, developing new products more efficiently and sustainably and much more,” Shelley Bransten, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Global Industry Solutions, said in April 2024 when the two companies announced the creation of the AI Innovation Lab, the next step in their strategic partnership. 
Estée Lauder’s edge: A high IQ 
The Estée Lauder Companies’ challenge has been that this data is spread among the company’s nearly 25 brands and the roughly 150 countries it operates in. With generative AI, its ConsumerIQ agent will analyze the company’s archives and data to quickly pull up the most relevant insights, to help the team market its current products or develop a new one. 
It can, for example, take hours to find, review and summarize PDFs and PowerPoints for use in a marketing campaign. With ConsumerIQ, an employee can ask the agent: “What are the latest trends for mascara use among Gen Z?” In seconds, ConsumerIQ will collect, summarize and deliver the answer. 
This frees the marketing team to focus on higher value work like developing a marketing strategy for a mascara that appeals to Gen Z customers. 
Let’s say an ELC brand is thinking about introducing a new moisturizer in the Pacific Northwest. A marketing lead can submit a simple prompt to ConsumerIQ: “What are popular moisturizing routines among customers in Washington state, Oregon and Idaho?” ConsumerIQ searches a trove of documents, often complex PDFs with graphs, pictures and other graphics, retrieves relevant information and shares it – in seconds. 
“I don’t have to read through 300 documents anymore. I just ask the question and it goes in precisely and runs through the entire data set and then gives me the answer,” says Shilpa Niranjan, a global IT business partner at The Estée Lauder Companies who is working on the AI Task Force developing ConsumerIQ. 
Finding what’s hot – and acting fast 
Data is powerful, but it means little if you don’t use it. That’s where the second part of Estée Lauder’s generative AI ecosystem, Trend Studio, comes in. 
For decades, the Consumer Insights Team has created in-depth reports on consumer behavior and trends – what customers really want.  
To harness this, ELC is building an agent, largely with Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search, to detect market trends, recommend products based on those trends, generate marketing copy with AI that’s tailored to recommended products and even offer Virtual Try-On Technology to show how a product will look. An entire process is streamlined and Estée Lauder gets the right product to customers faster. 
Speed and agility are overriding goals of ConsumerIQ and Trend Studio and together will accelerate the time from detecting a trend to responding. These goals tie directly into pillars of Estée Lauder’s corporate transformation: remove complexity, simplify how employees work and empower faster decision-making. 
As important, Estée Lauder will leverage its competitive advantage in the fast-moving world of prestige beauty, where smaller companies often quickly respond to the latest trends. 
“Beauty startups may be able to leap on the latest TikTok trend, but they don’t have 80 years of market knowledge like Estée does,” says Kalindi Mehta, global vice president for consumer foresight, strategy and predictive analytics at Estée Lauder. “And now Estée has the technology to harness it.”  
These generative AI tools will save decision makers critical time and free employees from time-sucking, often mundane work. The tools will also cut down on repetitive work, since it will be far easier to know what has already been done across Estée Lauder’s brands. 
Only the beginning 
ConsumerIQ and Trend Studio are only the latest steps in Estée Lauder’s AI transformation. 
“They’re really looking at this as an AI platform and they can continue adding modules that enhance the experience to essentially…accelerate the time from detecting a trend on TikTok, matching it to a product and then making that marketable to the consumer in a way that they’re asking to receive it,” says Alexa Higgins, a global client director at Microsoft, who works with Estée Lauder. 
In the future, for example, an agent could streamline manufacturing training. Instead of slogging through a dense training manual to learn how to perform one process, an employee could simply ask an agent to fetch instructions for that process in seconds. 
“It’s all part of our innovation mindset of ‘Hey, we need to be faster to leverage these technologies to enable our business in a new and different way,’” says Jennifer Lee, director of strategic initiatives and predictive analytics at Estée Lauder. “It’s really increasing our speed to be able to compete in the marketplace.” 
Learn how Microsoft Copilot and agents are changing today’s workplace.

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ByZak Doffman

ByZak Doffman,
Contributor.
Why you should delete your number.
A raft of headlines will worry Gmail users, as a researcher showed that a user’s private phone number could be “brute-forced” from their Google account using just their Gmail address. So, do you need to delete the phone number on your account?
Per 404Media, the researcher known as brutecat “was able to figure out the phone number linked to any Google account, information that is usually not public and is often sensitive, according to the researcher, Google, and 404 Media’s own tests.”
Google has confirmed the attack and deployed an update: “This issue has been fixed. We’ve always stressed the importance of working with the security research community through our vulnerability rewards program and we want to thank the researcher for flagging this issue. Researcher submissions like this are one of the many ways we’re able to quickly find and fix issues for the safety of our users.”
There are major privacy implications in “brute-forcing the phone number of any Google user,” as brutecat describes it, not least because it’s the unique identifier in secure messaging and account recovery, two areas where socially engineered attacks are rife. Fortunately, this was a proof of concept and has not been exploited — that we know.
Your phone number is held in two places in your Google account — account recovery and two-factor authentication (2FA), where it’s used to text codes when you sign in or access sensitive settings within the account. As I recommended last week, you should only use your number as an account recovery option but delete it for 2FA.
Google calls this two-step verification (2SV), and you can find details on changing your settings here. You should only use 2FA linked to physical hardware, which means passkeys, authenticator apps or for the truly security hardened, physical keys. Google’s other recent update is to push users to upgrade the security of their accounts, and that means no SMS 2FA, which means deleting your number in those 2SV settings.
One of the implications of this brute-force phone number leak is SIM swapping, where an attacker armed with your number can trick a phone company into issuing a new SIM and so utilize your account. This is a serious risk, given most 2FA is still SMS-based. You do not want an attacker to have your Gmail address and your SIM card.
The even bigger risk is a fake call claiming to be from a technical support desk. Google has been hit hard by such attacks and has patched as it goes. It emphasizes it will never call users with a security or account issue, but still those attacks come.
And so, in addition to deleting your phone number as a 2FA option, you should never engage with any technical or customer support desk from a major brand that calls or texts on the premise of an account or payment or password issue.

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How Neil Patel’s NP Digital uses SEO strategy to fuel its rapid APAC growth  Campaign Asia
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