I help build StrataChecks, a tool for NSW apartment owners to look up their strata plan and analyze inspection reports. Over the past few months, I’ve been writing SEO content for it — blog posts targeting specific search queries. The work has taught me things about how people search that I didn’t expect.

People search for names, not concepts

Our top searches, consistently, are manager names. “Network Strata Services.” “Netstrata.” “Strata Plus.” “Bright & Duggan.” People aren’t searching “how does strata management work” or “strata scheme explained.” They already know the concept. They want information about their specific manager.

This seems obvious in retrospect, but it inverted my assumptions about what content to write. I started by thinking we needed explainer content — “What is a strata plan?” style posts that introduce concepts. Those posts get some traffic, but they attract people who are early in their understanding and far from taking action. The person searching their manager’s name already owns an apartment, already has a manager, and is looking for something specific — maybe they’re unhappy, maybe they’re comparing, maybe they’re about to vote on changing managers.

The name-searchers are closer to doing something. The concept-searchers are still learning.

The gap between informational and transactional intent

In SEO, people distinguish between “informational” queries (someone wants to learn) and “transactional” queries (someone wants to do something). But working with real search data has shown me this distinction is blurrier than the categories suggest.

Take “how to change your strata manager.” That looks informational — it starts with “how to.” But the person searching it is probably already frustrated with their current manager and considering a switch. They don’t want a Wikipedia article. They want a guide they can act on, with enough procedural detail that they feel confident bringing it to their next owners’ meeting.

Or take “strata levies.” Pure informational on the surface. But someone searching this might be a new owner who just received their first levy notice and is wondering whether the amount is reasonable. The useful content isn’t just “what are strata levies” — it’s “here’s how to tell if your levies are appropriate for your building.”

The intent behind a search isn’t fixed by the words. It depends on who’s typing them and what situation drove them to the search box.

What I got wrong about content strategy

My initial instinct was to write comprehensive, authoritative content. Cover everything. Be the definitive resource. This produced posts that were thorough but unfocused — trying to serve everyone and therefore not particularly useful to anyone.

The posts that work better are the ones written for a specific person in a specific situation. Not “everything about strata disputes” but “what to do when your strata manager won’t respond to maintenance requests.” Not “understanding strata finances” but “how to read your annual financial statement and spot problems.”

The narrower the situation, the more useful the content — and paradoxically, the more search traffic it tends to attract. Broad topics have enormous competition. Narrow, specific situations often have almost none.

Writing for search intent feels different from writing for readers

There’s a tension I haven’t fully resolved. Writing for search intent means structuring content around what people are searching for — using their language, answering their specific questions, organizing content so search engines can parse it. This produces useful, findable content.

But it also produces content that feels slightly instrumentalized. Every heading is shaped by “what would someone search for?” rather than “what’s the most interesting way to explore this topic?” The writing serves the reader’s immediate need rather than offering a perspective they didn’t know they wanted.

I don’t think this is a problem exactly — utilitarian content that helps people is valuable. But it’s a different mode of writing than what I do on this blog, where I follow my own curiosity. SEO content is more like building a tool than writing an essay. You’re constructing something for someone else’s use case, and your own aesthetic preferences are mostly irrelevant.

The real lesson

The deepest thing I’ve learned is that search queries are small windows into real situations. Every query represents a person who encountered a problem, opened their browser, and tried to compress their situation into a few words. “Strata manager not responding.” “Special levy too high.” “How to read strata minutes.”

Good content strategy isn’t about gaming algorithms or stuffing keywords. It’s about taking those compressed queries seriously — expanding them back into the real situations they came from, and writing something genuinely useful for the person in that situation.

That’s harder than it sounds. It requires understanding not just the words someone typed, but why they typed them, what they already know, and what they’ll do with your answer. Getting that right, even sometimes, is more satisfying than I expected.