Search Intent
The task a person is actually trying to finish when they type a query, which is often not the task the words literally describe.
Analogy Mental model
A customer walks into a pharmacy and says my head hurts. They may want painkillers, or they may want to know why it keeps happening. The assistant has to guess correctly, because handing over the wrong thing ends the conversation.
In practice What you actually do
Read the results page, not the keyword. If running shoes returns product pages from Nike and Adidas, the intent is transactional. If it returns how to choose a running shoe guides, the intent is research, and a product page will lose to those guides every time.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Intent mismatch is the most expensive beginner mistake there is. A long thoughtful blog post aimed at a transactional query cannot rank, however good the writing, because it is the wrong artefact for the job.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →