Wouldn't it be great to add a visitor intent field in a keyword study ?

[Sindicic_Alexis]

Hello everybody,

With hummingbird update i think i understand that two pages like

• exclusive dating website
• chic dating services

which could have been targeted on 2 different pages can now be targeted in a single one. 
In the end google is asking "Well... isn't an "exclusive" dating website the.. same as a "chic" one ? isn't it the same visitor intent which is triggered ? ".

I'm building a new keyword study for one of my websites and i'm trying to be more in the "intent" point of view than in the "keyword" one.

I've added a new column to my study which includes transactional / navigational and informational dropdown. I think this information is great but i feel that something is missing...

I wonder if we could include a column which describes the real visitor intent in the form of a "user story" 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story

for example :

As a visitor i want to land on a page that proves that the company is only working with "exclusive" people.
-> We could optimise this page for all the "exclusive" "chic" "fancy" "elegant" "elite" keywords.

Just a thought, i'd be really interested in knowing your point of view.

Thanks a lot for your answers

[Toddfoster]

My answer is a bit of a cop-out but also a legitimate concern/issue with such a system so please bear with me.

I agree that intent should drive results. The big problem is converting human intent into a mechanical algorithm. Some people have a certain intent but their lack of vocabulary or understanding of a word might affect their search terms. Using your example, one person's "chic" is another person's "average". Granted, this might be a bit extreme and slightly in the mold of "Devil's Advocate", but I think one of the reasons we haven't moved in that direction is that even the "User Story" approach can be difficult to employ across entire industry spectrums.

It would be a great thing to have introduced and I would love to see it happen but human subjectivity is going to be hard to overcome in the form of an algorithm. Such a process might involve some form of learning algorithm similar to cookies which will identify what you searched for (and ended up spending the most time looking at) and linking that to keywords and terms found on various websites with matching profiles. The problem then becomes how much private information can search engines gather about your behavior online in the name of providing you with a better user experience...it just seems like a lot of unpleasant questions that Google (and others) don't want to have on their plates right now.

I am not a programmer so the technicalities elude me, but a man can dream, right?

Where do you see this going in the future?

[Sindicic_Alexis]

Hello Robert,

First of all thanks for the quality of your answer.

When i first wrote this question i was thinking of a "real human" reading all the keywords and determining an intent for each of them and not of an algorythm :).

I'm actually working on my keyword study with this goal in mind :

-> i try to be in my "persona's shoes" while reading each keyword and i ask myself "what's the intent behind this keyword".

Then i write a little user story and link it to several keywords.

This way of processing makes me feel like a "re-humanisation" of keyword study ; i don't only group the keywords semantically (like a robot could do) but i try to dig and discover what's behind and ie: how to please my visitor.