What to ask your agency about search intent
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on search intent, these questions are worth asking early.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Match the format people expect for that query. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. 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. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
What this looks like day to day
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
- Informational queries rarely convert directly, and that is fine — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.