What is Search Intent?
Search intent is the reason someone searches - not the typed word, but the underlying need. Four base types: informational (understand something), commercial (compare options), transactional (buy/act) and navigational (find a specific page).
Google now primarily judges whether a page satisfies the intent - not whether the keyword appears often enough. Serving a purchase page for 'CRM software' when searchers want to compare won't rank, however optimised the page is. The results page itself reveals the intent: what Google shows there is the answer it deems correct.
In practice: before writing, look at the current results page for the keyword. Guides there mean the user wants to learn. Product pages mean they want to buy. The content must match the dominant format - otherwise you fight the search engine's expectation.
Why does Search Intent matter?
The best technical SEO is useless if the content serves the wrong intent. Search intent is the filter that decides whether a page even qualifies as a fitting answer.
Search Intent in practice
- 01'what does a website cost' = informational → a guide ranks, not the hard-sell pricing page.
- 02'website agency vienna' = commercial/local → provider lists and local results dominate.
- 03A glance at the current results page reveals the intent Google assumes - the best available brief for your own content.
From the journal
- Why the search on your website finds nothingThe answer is on your site, and the search box still says no results. The reason is not missing content but mechanics: the built-in search compares strings of characters, the visitor is looking for a meaning. What WordPress and Shopify actually do, which queries fail, who you lose at zero results, what our sample of ten websites showed, and how a search finds meaning instead of letters.
- The FAQ page: what it is for now that Google no longer highlights itSince 7 May 2026 Google has shown no FAQ rich result at all, for anyone. If you built the page for that one feature, you now have a page without a purpose. At the same time, half of all customer service journeys no longer start on your own website but on Google, YouTube or ChatGPT. What that means for your answers, and how to write them so they hold up where you do not control the layout.
- Programmatic SEO for small teams: scaling without landing in the spam filterGenerate thousands of pages from a database and sweep up the long tail - the promise of programmatic SEO sounds like a shortcut. The reality: 96.55 per cent of the pages Ahrefs studied get zero Google traffic, and Google has been targeting scaled content since 2024. When the model still pays off for a small team - and how to build it without burning your domain.
