Reverse Engineering user Intent using SERPs — Kevin Indig // G2

Quotes

• “The way that I understand user intent is basically the end goal that the user has in mind that performs the Google search. It sounds relatively trivial but its a bit more complex for a couple of reasons but the biggest one is that the machine has to understand what that actually is.” -Kevin

• “We as human beings are very good at understanding implicit meanings but for search engines, it has to be as explicit as possible. To be fair, search engines especially Google has gotten much better at understanding intent over the years.” -Kevin

• “User intent is more or less like the gateway to search results.” -Kevin

• “When I think about user intent, I think about something that Jordan Koene told me about SEO, a long time ago. There are three categories for user intent, there is informational, transactional, and directional.” -Ben

• “As search engines have become smarter, they are also able to detect a much finer user intent that fits into these buckets. Google published these user guidelines and in this, there are six different user intents but my assumption is that there are actually hundreds of user intent. Users have learned to use certain modifiers to indicate their user intent.” -Kevin

• “SERP features are all sorts of modules that Google shows in the search results to give people a better answer aside from the organic results.” -Kevin

• “Ben Gomez wrote an article about the next 20 years of search. In that article, he touched on three big shifts. For example the shift from queries to a query-less search experience, the shift from text to images, and the shift from questions to answers.” -Kevin

• “Within that, they also used psychology called the topic layer, which sits on the top of the knowledge graph, which is Googles database of entities like names, places, people, books, and so on. Topics like opinions or trends, news and all that kind of stuff and thats why with the technological advance, they start to show more and more SERP features, meaning we can actually get smarter about how Google interprets user intent.” -Kevin

• “A couple of examples are vs. queries, like Product 1 vs. Product 2. But the interesting is that the definition of these things changes over time especially with modifiers like best cheap and a couple of others because what do you define as best? Thats not always easy to define. Its subjective and Google gets better at understanding the subjectivity behind these queries and gives you suggestions. I call this query-refinement bubbes.” -Kevin

• “You can take the tool like Searchmetrics, for example, which allows you to track keywords but also show you the SERP features thatit found for a specific keyword. From that, you would create a spreadsheet and say that whenever Google shows SERP feature x, the user intent equals y.” -Kevin

• “Once you have that spreadsheet, you have that indicator, not only what formats your content has to come in but also what your content has to be about.” -Kevin

• “I think the keyword is formatting. When you are understanding what the query is, you can look at the elements that Google has on the SERP, you can go back and reformat your content, makesure that you have the right elements that give you the highest probability to show up in that knowledge graph type experience.” -Ben

• “Most SEOs are thinking about keywords and on-page content and they are not always connecting the dots to what the search experience is, on Google, and building around how their content will be shown. So thinking about user intent and gauging how Google is interpreting the user intent by what modules they are putting on the SERP is a really interesting way to start thinking about creating more relevant, targeted searches.” -Ben