Before you invest in search intent

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on search intent, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Match the format people expect for that query
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

What to watch for

Informational queries rarely convert directly, and that is fine. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Look at the current results to see what the engine rewards. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

How to tell if yours is fine

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about search intent before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Look at the current results to see what the engine rewards — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.