Keyword Vs. User intent

bychengckalex

3.5K followers

10 years ago

I've just read a question within the community asking if and where in our post should we put the keyword and if the exact keyword need to be found within the post.

I wanna share my experience 3 years ago when i performed the role as result page rater with Google after I was made redundant by my former employer.

In a nutshell, the job was to evaluate the relevancy of search result Google had presented to its customer against their intent. Google employs (I think they still do) raters with different demographic background all over the world targeting customer (people who present search queries to the search engine from different localities). I was employed to rate the search results presented to Chinese customers from Chinese speaking communities.

Right from the outset when I started to attend their online (every procedure done online) rater training, I was instructed that my top responsibilities was to figure out the intent of user behind his/her queries. BUT NOT on any keyword (in fact, I'd never done any assignment(s) to figure out what was the keyword).

Localities of the origin of query is also a factor of consideration. For example, "Orange" as a query can represent different intent from customers in USA and Europe. USA customer's intent behind the query can be just to find images of orange or where to find bargain on orange. But for European customers, it can probably mean they want to find information on a major local cellular network carrier bearing the Orange brand.

Google paid at least a team of 5 raters to do the same search result. And above them there are at least one more hierarchical level to monitor the result which will eventually be adopted to improve the search engine performance. Thus it is no wonder why Google rank the highest in the search industry.

The reason why I write the above is to urge that when you write anything in your website doing online business, always put your target customers' interest and well being as your top priority. Your customers' benefit is your keyword.