Do not aim for 100% accuracy. Deciphering visitor intent is a qualitative area of research. Your goal is to look for general trends to understand what brings visitors to your website.

No companies spend more time analyzing visitors’ intent based on keywords than search engine companies. The quality of search engine results pages (SERPs), and therefore the quality of the search engine itself, depends on providing relevant data to the term a person searched for. Search engines use complex algorithms to decode visitor intent based on linguistics. They also have the advantage of monitoring what search results people are clicking on when they search for a particular term. If people regularly click on a particular result when searching for a term, the engine creates an association between this type of result and the search term.

Table 5-2 shows the breakdown of the type results that search engines display for the term “laptop.” When a person searches for this term, Google takes this as an indicator of an intent to buy a laptop. In this case, Google SERPs are heavily tilted toward ecommerce, showing eight ecommerce websites out of the 12 results on the page. Bing, on the other hand, splits the results evenly between review and ecommerce websites. The Yahoo! SERP divides the results equally among ecommerce, review, and general knowledge websites.

In the following sections, we will cover how you can improve your website to cater to visitors at each buying stage. As you read through each section, keep in mind that a wealth of information creates a poverty of interest. Your goal is to provide the right amount of information for each stage, and nothing more.