Search intent research

What search intent research is

Search intent research takes a list of searches and decides, one search at a time, what the person typing it actually wants: a quick answer, a comparison between options, or a supplier to hire. The output is not a description of the searcher. It is a decision about page type — article, comparison, landing page, short answer, or no page at all — recorded against every search on the list.

It is the step between the keyword list and the plan. Keyword and topic research produces the terms. The SEO content strategy puts the resulting pages in order against a budget. This service sits between them and settles the question both depend on: what kind of page does each search call for.

When you need one

You need it when you have a keyword list and the pages built from it produce no inquiries. A business has written long articles for searches where people wanted a price and a phone number, or built service pages for searches where people wanted an explanation and were not ready to buy from anyone.

It also earns its keep before a rebuild, when you are deciding how many pages the new site needs and of what kind. Getting the page type wrong is expensive to correct once a designer has built the templates around it.

You do not need this if you have no keyword list yet. Buying intent research first is backwards, because there is nothing to classify. Start with the research that produces the terms, which already sorts searches into coarse groups, and come back only when the coarse sort stops being enough. If your list is a dozen searches for one service in one town, the classification is an afternoon of work and does not need a project of its own.

What gets looked at

Intent is not guessed from the wording of the search. It is read off evidence, in this order.

• The results page as it stands today. What Google currently shows is the plainest available statement of what it believes people want. A map above a list of businesses is a supplier search. Ten explainers is a learning search. A lifted answer at the top means a long page will not be read.
• The shape of the pages holding the top places. Not their rankings, their shape: length, format, whether they carry prices, whether they ask for a booking. A results page of articles with one supplier page high in it is a mixed search, and mixed searches need a decision rather than a default.
• The modifiers. “How” and “what is” behave differently from “near me”, “cost” and “versus”. Useful signals, but each is checked against the real results page rather than trusted on its own, because plenty of “how” searches now return suppliers.
• Your own evidence. Which searches already bring people to your site, and what they do once they arrive. A search that brings visits and never an inquiry usually has an intent your page is not serving.
• Whether a visit is even available. Some searches are answered on the results page itself, by a lifted snippet or an assistant summary. Those are marked, because a page written for them earns a mention rather than a visit, and that changes what it should contain.

Every search then gets one of four labels — answer, comparison, supplier, or not worth a page — and one recommended page type.

What you get

The intent sheet. Your keyword list returned with four new columns: what the search wants, what the results page rewards, the page type I recommend, and whether a page you already have could qualify with work. One row per search.

The page-type summary. Two or three pages saying how many pages of each type the list calls for, which searches can share a page because they want the same thing, and which look alike but must not share one. That second group is where most sites quietly lose.

The discards, with reasons. Every search marked not worth a page, and why: the results page already serves the intent, it wants something you do not sell, or the people typing it are not buyers.

The walkthrough. Forty-five minutes on video with whoever will write or commission the pages.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Halifax accounting firm arrives with a keyword list of 96 searches, bought from an agency the year before, and eleven blog posts written against it. The posts bring visits and no inquiries, and nobody can say why.

The classification finds 31 supplier searches, mostly a service plus the city, and the firm has pages for four of them. It finds 38 comparison searches, mostly about incorporating versus staying a sole proprietor, which is exactly where the eleven posts are aimed — and those results pages are held by long guides from national software firms. It finds 19 answer searches where a two-sentence answer already sits on the results page, so a full article is wasted effort. The last eight are people looking for free software, and are marked not worth a page. The recommendation is twenty-seven new supplier pages before another word of explanation is written, and three existing posts rebuilt as short answer pages instead of guides.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, who buys it, and where the keyword list came from. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Based on the length of the list. Agreed before anything starts.
3. The list and your data. Your keyword list in any format, and read-only access to your search data so I can see which searches already reach you.
4. The classification. Three to six working days for a list of one to two hundred searches. Longer lists are quoted separately, because every results page is read by hand.
5. The walkthrough. The sheet and the summary arrive the day before the call, so you read them cold.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the size varies with the length of your list and how many results pages must be examined one at a time. The pricing page shows the four ways of working here and the bands that carry published numbers. Whatever the figure turns out to be, it is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The sheet goes into an ordered plan, because the page types are settled and only sequence and money are left. Or the supplier searches go straight to writing as pages built for one commercial search. Or, when rivals turn out to cover intents you have never touched, the next piece is search gap research. This work is complete on its own: a decision is recorded against every search on your list, and nothing further is assumed.