The way that I would explain search intent is literally the intent of the search. So, when somebody is sat at their phone or their laptop, and they're searching for something, what do they mean when they search? Are they looking for a piece of information quickly? Are they looking to buy something? There are so many different reasons why people search, I think it's important to understand what the majority of people doing that particular search mean.

If we plug this into Ahrefs, it shows that razor is searched for 27,000 times per month. For a headline, that's pretty big. If you're an e-commerce site that sells razors, you might assume that it's the golden ticket. Getting all of those visitors to your site would be a big win. However, you need to look at the actual search results. What do you think would be the top results when you search razor?

I think that's a fair assumption. But if we do a manual search, and we just plug in the word razor to Google, we get a site called razor.com. It's an exact match domain, which does make sense. However, it's an electric scooter company for children. Not quite what we had in mind, being an e-commerce razor company. It's got a lot of backlinks as well. Google will consider it a popular brand because there are so many people linking. So, I think from Google's point of view, it's quite a fair assumption to think people searching for the word razor are searching for the brand Razor, not just razors to buy.

You get another couple of results that aren't quite right. Google isn't quite sure what kind of results to return. There's a knowledge panel on the right that breaks down into some different categories. It explains what a razor is. You also get Razor USA, which is the scooter company. You also get Razer Incorporated, which is a hardware company. Out of those 27,000 people that are searching, some are looking for a shaving razor, some are looking for a scooter, and others are looking for hardware.

We get a Wikipedia article on razors. Most people, I hope, will know what a razor is. Then we have Boots, Gillette, and Amazon. The big players within the industry. Anyone below that will have pretty low click-through rates. So, we might need to start looking at other keyword ideas that we can use.

Absolutely. I think it's almost not worth competing unless you've got an exceptionally high budget and a talented SEO team. The return that you're going to get on that is going to be quite low. I think you're better off trying to focus on something a little bit more refined, where people know a little bit more about what it is that they're searching for.

I agree. They've also got the power of the known brand behind them. You see them on TV, radio, and on social. They are completely cross-channel. Whereas an e-commerce brand might solely invest in SEO and a bit of paid ads. So, a lot of people will be pulled into the familiarity of those household brands.