What is “Keyword Intent”?

Happy New Year! For our first blog of the new year, I want to chat a little bit about keyword intent and what it means.

One SEO concept that continues to shape search performance is keyword intent — in simple terms, what someone is actually trying to accomplish when they type a query into Google. Not all searches mean the same thing, even if the keywords look similar. For example, someone searching “injection molding” may be looking for a basic definition, while someone searching “injection molding manufacturer near me” is likely ready to contact a supplier. Google’s algorithms have become increasingly good at understanding this difference and ranking pages that best match the searcher’s intent, not just the words themselves.

Keyword intent generally falls into a few categories: informational (learning something), navigational (finding a specific site), and transactional (taking action, such as requesting a quote or making a purchase). Pages that don’t align with the intent behind a keyword — even if they are well written — often struggle to rank or convert. This is why some pages attract traffic but fail to generate leads, while others with less traffic perform better overall.

As part of our ongoing SEO work, we review not just which keywords you rank for, but why people are searching for them and what they expect to see. By aligning your content more closely with search intent, we help ensure that the visitors arriving at your site are more qualified, more engaged, and more likely to take the next step.

Hopefully this helps you understand what it means when people say “keyword intent” and how it impacts you and your website.