Search intent: the absolute key to keyword research and SEO

Chapter 6 of the SEO from zero guide. Published in December 2019 and revised in August 2026: we added the method for verifying intent — which the original explained but never taught you to check — and turned the example table into a list so it reads just as well on a phone.

Pinning down search intent precisely is one of the keys to any successful SEO effort. Get it right and the engine rewards you; get it wrong, or cheat to rank fast, and it leaves you in the dark or penalises you.

What is search intent?

Imagine it is Friday, you have just closed a deal, and you want to take the family somewhere different for dinner. You probably start by asking colleagues, to get a feel for it, and then search online for the right place for the occasion.

Your search terms will look something like this:

• exotic restaurants in Bogotá
• family restaurants in Bogotá
• exotic food in Bogotá

Then you start ruling out types of place and settle on Japanese, so your searches get more specific:

• Japanese restaurant in Bogotá
• sushi restaurant in Bogotá
• Japanese food in Bogotá

And from those results you choose where to go.

Now flip it around: imagine you own a Japanese restaurant with dishes adapted for the whole family — bold and heavily seasoned for adults, more traditional for the children. If you want to attract people, the first thing you think of is your website and a blog.

Suppose you have these three pages:

• Home — term: Japanese restaurant in Bogotá
• Blog: “Japanese food in Bogotá: find the perfect spot” — term: Japanese food in Bogotá
• Blog: “Exotic food in Bogotá: 10 places that will surprise you” — term: exotic food in Bogotá

What will the search engine do when someone types that and you have put real work into the content? Give you relevance, and with it the attention of potential buyers.

Search intent is the real question a person has at the moment they start searching. It is what they need resolved, and what you have to help them answer.

That is why SEO means optimising technically for the bots that visit your site while never losing sight of the fact that you are solving a real person’s problem.

How do you verify intent instead of guessing?

This is the part the original text took for granted, and it is the most useful of all: intent is not deduced, it is verified by reading the results page.

Type the term into the search engine and look at what comes back. If page one is full of articles and comparisons, the intent is informational and your sales page will not get in, however well optimised. If it is full of product listings, it is transactional. If a map with businesses appears, it is local — and there the game is played on your business profile more than on your website, as we saw when going through how people contact a business through Google Maps. If videos show up, people want to watch, not read.

That glance, which costs thirty seconds per term, is what prevents the most expensive mistake in SEO: building the wrong type of page for a search that was already telling you what it expected.

A fourth category has settled in alongside the three from chapter 2: commercial investigation — “best”, “vs”, “reviews”, “alternatives” — which is where the purchase gets decided before the purchase happens.

The two variables that decide

Back to the restaurant. These would be some candidate terms:

Japanese restaurant · Japanese restaurant in Bogotá · sushi restaurant in Bogotá · family Japanese restaurant in Bogotá · Japanese food in Bogotá · traditional Japanese food · Asian food in Bogotá · traditional Asian food in Bogotá · exotic food in Bogotá.

Two variables decide between them:

Difficulty. SEO has degrees of difficulty depending on how popular a term is in a given place. Ranking for “Japanese restaurant” is far harder than for “family Japanese restaurant in Bogotá”. The more contested it is, the less likely you are to climb quickly.

Traffic. You have to make sure the term makes sense by volume. You could rank for “family Japanese restaurant in Bogotá”, with almost no competition, and discover that hardly anyone searches that way. Better option: “Japanese food in Bogotá”, somewhat more contested but with far more searches.

And that is it. What, no more variables?

Thousands of factors affect rankings, but almost everything reduces to those two: how much potential traffic you can attract and how hard it is to attract it. Find terms with desirable traffic and manageable competition, create genuinely valuable content for your prospects, and you rank.

Applied to the example, the decision looks like this:

• Japanese restaurant — has traffic, high difficulty → no
• Japanese restaurant in Bogotá — has traffic, medium difficulty → yes
• sushi restaurant in Bogotá — has traffic, medium difficulty → yes
• family Japanese restaurant in Bogotá — no traffic, low difficulty → no
• Japanese food in Bogotá — has traffic, medium difficulty → yes
• traditional Japanese food — has traffic, low difficulty → yes
• Asian food in Bogotá — has traffic, medium difficulty → yes
• traditional Asian food in Bogotá — no traffic, low difficulty → no
• exotic food in Bogotá — has traffic, medium difficulty → yes

This breakdown is a teaching example, not a real measurement. And it is worth remembering that the volumes tools give you are estimates, not exact readings: they are useful for comparing terms against each other, not for promising visits.

And that is how you decide to start with the three pieces of content from the beginning: the home page and the two articles.

With focused, deliberate effort, the SEO you do will be far more effective than spreading your energy across twenty terms at once.

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