Keyword intent describes the goal behind a search. Understanding intent tells you what type of page — a guide, a comparison, a product page, or a homepage — has the best chance of ranking and satisfying the searcher.
The four standard categories
- Informational — the user wants to learn ("what is keyword difficulty").
- Navigational — the user wants a specific site ("semoptimiser login").
- Commercial — the user is researching before a purchase ("best rank tracker 2026").
- Transactional — the user is ready to act ("buy semoptimiser").
Example
The query "best CRM for small business" is commercial. A product homepage will rarely rank because Google's top results are dominated by comparison articles and listicles that match the researcher's intent.
How SEM Optimiser reports it
Every keyword in SEM Optimiser is classified with an intent label plus the model or source that produced it. Mismatches between page type and query intent are surfaced as a fix suggestion during audits.
Related terms
- Keyword Difficulty
Keyword difficulty is a 0-to-100 score that estimates how hard it is for a website to rank in the top ten organic results for a given search query.
- Search Volume
Search volume is the average number of times a specific query is searched per month in a given country and language.
- SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
A SERP is the page a search engine returns in response to a query, containing organic results, paid ads, and specialised features such as knowledge panels or AI Overviews.
- On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimising individual web pages so their content and HTML signals match what search engines expect for the queries they target.