Search Intent

Building traffic from search was treated for a long time as picking the queries with the most searches. Then a well-written page aimed at one of those queries fails to climb, over and over.

Pagedeck's first blog post went that way. Ravi chose "meeting notes template" and wrote 1,500 words on how to take good meeting notes. Four months later it was still outside the top twenty. Searching the phrase himself explained it: positions one through ten were all downloadable template files. The searcher wanted a file and the page was something to read. The mismatch had nothing to do with quality, and it needed a name.

Queries split four ways by what the searcher expects. Which one applies isn't guessed — it's read off the results page.

1. Learning something. Questions about what a thing is or how to do it, like "how to take meeting notes." The results page is full of explanatory articles and help pages.
2. Reaching a specific site. Typing a product or company name, using the search box as an address bar. If your own site isn't first here, something else is wrong — usually a name collision with a larger brand.
3. Comparing options. Phrases like "best meeting notes app," where the expectation is a list and a comparison table. The results are articles lining several products up.
4. Buying now. "Collaborative document pricing" and similar, where someone is checking the price to decide. Closest to a signup, and the lowest search volume of the four.
5. Determining which one applies ends with opening the query and reading the top ten on the search engine results page. Ten template files means the intent is finding a file. That screen beats whatever label a keyword tool assigned.
6. A mixed results page means a split query. Five explainers and five product round-ups suggests one page with the explanation first and the comparison table after it, rather than two pages competing with each other.

"The intent doesn't match, so a product page won't rank for this."

The character of the results page and the character of our page disagree.

"Ten times the volume, but the intent is informational, so it won't bring signups."

Plenty of traffic, a long way from conversion.

"Did you actually search it? The top ten are all template files."

Judge from the screen rather than from the tool's classification.

From then on, whenever Ravi shortlisted a query he opened the results page and wrote one line describing what the top ten were. It added a step before writing and it removed the possibility of losing four months. "Meeting notes template" got an actual downloadable template attached to it, and the original article moved over to "how to take meeting notes," where it reached fourth.