Search intent: why the right page matters more than the right keyword

Search intent is what someone wants to achieve with a search: learn something, get something done, find a particular page or go somewhere. It decides which kind of page answers a query best — which is why, for me, a good keyword strategy doesn't start with a list of terms but with the question of which page exists for which intent.

Google puts it this way itself: to return relevant results, it first needs to establish what you're looking for — the intent behind your query (Google, How Search works).

How Google tells intentions apart

In the guidelines for its quality raters (version of 11 September 2025), Google distinguishes four kinds of queries (Google, Rater Guidelines, section 12.7):

• Know: someone wants to find something out — "how long does a wooden window last".
• Do: someone wants to get something done — request a quote, book an appointment.
• Website: someone wants to find a specific page — "Huber joinery Merano".
• Visit in person: someone wants to go somewhere — "carpenter near me".

Two things in that document matter in practice, I find. First: the line between "know" and "do" is often blurry, and raters aren't supposed to separate them strictly. Second: the ratings don't directly affect how a page ranks; Google uses them to measure its systems. So the document isn't a checklist to tick off, but a look at what Google means by a good result.

In marketing tools the same intentions often go by other names: informational, commercial, transactional, navigational. At heart it's the same thing.

Three searches, three pages

Take a joinery near Merano:

• "carpenter Merano" — visit in person and do. The right page is the service page with location, service area, opening hours and a clear path to an enquiry.
• "window restoration cost" — know, with buying intent behind it. A guide with a price range, the process and the questions that come before an order helps here.
• "Huber joinery" — website. The home page has to show beyond doubt that you're in the right place.

A typical mistake: all three intentions end up on the same page, usually the home page. Then no page answers a question properly — and if you later build a page for every question without dividing the terms cleanly, they suddenly compete for the same word. That's called keyword cannibalization.

Andrei Broder studied how intentions are distributed back in 2002: in a sample of 400 queries from the search engine AltaVista, 48% aimed to know something, 30% at a transaction and 20% at a specific website (Broder, 2002). The study is old and small, but its method is open — and the direction still holds: most searches first want to know something.

A keyword strategy without expensive tools

For a small business a simple process is often enough:

1. Write down your customers' questions the way they ask them on the phone. Assign each one to an intention.
2. Give every intention a page and every page its own focus keyword. A term belongs to exactly one page.
3. Look in Search Console to see which queries your pages already appear for. A page is often found for something nobody planned. That tells you what people are actually looking for.
4. Start with terms where you're just behind the first page of results. A revision pays off most there. On btlabs.dev, for example, a good dozen queries currently sit there, such as "website in ki sichtbar machen".
5. Think in all three languages. The intention is usually the same, the words aren't. "Tischler" and "falegname" are not one translated keyword but two separate searches.

What btlabs Core has built in — and what it hasn't

Every page carries a focus keyword and up to four secondary keywords per language; the search intent is set once per page. A focus keyword may belong to only one page per language. Search Console data arrives every night: in the editing window the editors see which queries a page is found for, and the cockpit shows terms just short of the first results page — separately for Google and Bing — as well as queries a page is found for without having been planned for them.

With an AI connection set up, the platform also suggests terms and intentions. Only terms that appear in your own text are taken over, and nothing without approval.

What it doesn't do: keyword research with search volumes. There are dedicated tools for that — and the strategy itself is consulting, not software. We do that at Berger+Team.

How intention, content, links and AI visibility fit together is shown in the overview SEO and GEO. How to tell whether the page itself does its job is covered in Content SEO: how to tell whether a page is good enough. The term itself is in the glossary under search intent.

Sources

• Google: How Search works — ranking results
• Google: Search Quality Rater Guidelines, version 11 Sep 2025
• Andrei Broder: A taxonomy of web search, SIGIR Forum 2002