How Google Manage Different Levels of User Intention

The library of Alexandria was the first time humanity attempted to bring the sum total of human knowledge together in one place at one time. Our latest attempt? Google. — Brewstel Kahle, entrepreneur and founder, the Internet Archive.

People pour all their wants, fears, and intentions into the realm of search engines. This makes the aggregation of thoughts and ideas of humankind available online, and the majority of it lies in the hands of Google. The intention drives the search, and it all starts with a person holding their device or sitting in front of the screen, typing in a query.

Queries and The Search Engine

Queries are phrases that a person types into the search bar of a search engine or speaks into a mobile phone [p70]. This is what users want to discover. Keywords are words or phrases taken from a single search query or several search queries. This is what the website wants to climb up the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

User Intent is when a user is trying to accomplish something.

Search Engine connects the query you enter to a collection of pages it has created of Web Pages (index). It then shows a list of URLs it believes are most relevant for your query. It has three major parts: the crawl, the index, and the query processor.

The Query Processor connects the user's intention to the Index. The Crawl is the spiders crawling each page in the interwebs, looking for new URLs and understanding them. Possibly, this is the most important piece of search engine. The information they get from the pages is based on the structured data they get from the site owners. It will be reported to the Index and will be ranked according to the different sets of ranking signals, analyze its content and meaning, and eventually index them.

Search engines reward pages that offer quality content and a positive experience to the users. Another factor is the discoverability and indexability of the pages. It will evaluate these elements and decipher the user’s intentions, clusters its results to get a narrow and relevant URL.

Different Levels of Intention

A search is a means to an end. This is to satisfy underlying questions or goals that the user is trying to attain. It might be recovering what we know or filling what we don’t know. It can be driven by the user’s current mood like when someone is bored and looking for funny videos or photos. It might also be a part of a long-term goal such as booking a trip. It might also be a question on hand like if you are looking for a home remedy for toothache.

Queries can have multiple meanings. When a user typed “apple” might refer to the brand of a computer or a fruit. The query “ball” might refer to the shape of the object or famous Miley Cyrus' song.

Google’s Search Quality Interpretation Guide [p72] provided us with three layers on how to interpret queries with multiple meanings. I believe the main difference is based on the number of people who can interpret the query:

• Dominant Interpretation if the query is can be understood by the general public
• Common interpretation of the query can be interpreted by many or some users.
• Minor Interpretation if only a few can understand the query.

Queries can also be fluid, they can change their meanings over time. Google assumes that users are looking for current information about the topic, product information unless otherwise specified by the query [p73]. For example when a user types “population of Spain”, this will find the current population of Spain.

The location of the user is important to understand the query and user intent. Users with the same query in a different location might have different expectations, such as “weather today”, “date today” , or “near me” related queries.

There are four major categories of search intent: navigational, informational transactional, and interactional.

Informational Queries (Know Searches)

Users having these queries want to know more about something. They commonly seek to answer the basic when, where, who, what, why, how questions, but it can be not in a question format. For example “date today” has the same user intent as “what is the date today”. In the evaluator's guideline, this is called Know Simple query [p74], which has a short and complete answer.

Informational queries made up 80% of human intention searches. This can be a good opportunity to generate traffic on your website and offer the reader for further actions. Adding a “call to action” button or links in the informational pages or offering products or services that the visitor might use in the obtained information.

Shareable content like videos, infographics, PDFs can be utilized to achieve high ranking in search results, especially if has high quality and is user-oriented.

Transactional Queries (Do Searches)

Transactional queries intend to accomplish a goal or engage in an activity on a phone [p75]. An action word is present at the beginning of the query, it can be “buy”, “order”, “reserve”, “purchase”, “download”. The user intent might also be entertained or to subscribe, contact, or interact with a website or app.

These are the action signals that strategists want to capture. They use paid search to show up their website when users are looking for the specific or related products or services they offer.

When a user is using their phone to make a query, for instance, while driving a car, this is called Device Action Query — a do search that aims to fulfill a task while in hands-free mode [p76]. Common queries start with “call”, “send”, “navigate”, “show”, “go”, “schedule”, or “set”.

For example in e-commerce, the user may have the readiness to buy a product but may not know yet specifically which brand, or the user may know the brand but not know yet where to purchase it.

Local searches may also qualify as transactional queries.

The Navigational Queries (Go Searches)

This is usually when users want to go to the website of a specific brand name, product name, or service name. They have a very particular intention to go for the specific website to perform actions: browse, search, interact, ask questions, etc. Usually, they already know the site exists or assume should exist.

Queries could have a possible combination of “site name” + “action or intention” or simply “site name”.

The Interactional Queries (Visit-in-Person Searches)

These queries are usually done by users carrying mobile phones. Some queries ask for information nearby like businesses or organizations.

Conclusion:

Almost every month, search engines are releasing updates and fixes, to improve critical pieces of search intent and they are increasingly getting better.

In preparing a new content:

• Prepare the content as broadly as possible so that it can be easily found by users without sacrificing the purpose of the page.
• Create content to answer specific intentions. It should have a beneficial purpose and attain that purpose according to your goal.
• The search engine has a very high page quality standard rating for pages that belongs to what they call “Your Money or Your Life” content. These are the content that could potentially affect the well-being of a person, specifically their happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. The website owner should focus on establishing E-A-T when developing content that belongs to YMYL.
• If you are having trouble understanding search intent, don’t be afraid to use ads or pull data from Google Search Console. The data we can get from it can help you determine keywords you would like your website to show up for in search and even potential topics for your next content.

Lastly, while focusing on increasing your sales or extending your reach, don’t forget about providing value to your audience. Create meaningful and useful content that can satisfy them and build a high-quality target audience, which has the potential for greater future conversion.