How to Interpret Context/Intent
Last updated
Last updated
Where possible, we recommend selecting the "context", or intent, feature within the clustering tool
When this is selected, each keyword you provide will be analyzed by our machine learning models to understand the purpose or 'intent' behind it. For instance, with each keyword uploaded, we'll inform you if the resulting content is primarily transactional, informational, or of a different page type. We use the term "context" instead of "intent", a term used by some of our competitors, to highlight the uniqueness of our approach. Our method often yields more precise results in terms of what you, as a user, are searching for. It considers the 'contextual setting' surrounding the keyword. For more information on this, you can read our blog here: on what keyword context is.
There are multiple ways to interpret and use the results. It's perhaps best to show you how to use it within the exportable spreadsheets first as it'll make it easier to understand how the "context" is worked out and how you should use it.
If you download or open up the Excel or Google Sheets file, in one of the tabs you'll see each keyword on a separate row with 3 important columns in. These columns are "Article", "Product/Category" and "Other page type".
Each column contains a figure indicating the number of top 10 search results related to that page type. For instance, if you see the keyword "keyword research" with a '6' under the "article" column and a '4' under the "Product" column, it means that 6 out of 10 results are informational and 4 out of 10 results are transactional. In such a situation, the results are fairly mixed, but "informational" is the dominant intent. This suggests you could create both a product page and an informational page using this keyword without undermining your own SEO efforts, but an informational page is more likely to rank higher. Therefore, your focus should primarily be on creating informational content.
When you view this in the pivot table tab, you're simply seeing the "average" of all the keywords in that cluster.
Now you know how it works, let's take a look at it in the UI of the tool.
If you're in the UI, you can simply select the "context" filter along the top row and filter the clusters by their "dominant" intent.
Whether you're in the UI, or using the export, there's a wide range of use cases for being able to filter the clusters by their intent.
If you're using the Google Sheets or Excel version, you can apply a filter on the sheet to look for all the keywords with "fragmented intent". I.e. those that are split more equally between transactional and informational results. You can then formulate an entire SEO strategy on ranking twice in the SERP results (once with a product page and once with an informational one) without fear of cannibalizing yourself.
Within the UI, you can navigate to the "topical clusters" tab, and change the bubbles to be coloured by context, and get a very visual idea of whether your SEO strategy is going to be largely content-based or optimising product pages. See image below.
Here is a video that shows how to interpret the Context/search intent produced by Keyword Insights.
If you've also pulled in the rank of your target domain, you can easily apply a filter within the UI to only show you informational clusters that your target domain doesn't rank for (or ranks poorly for). This gives you your "content gap". You can read more about that in our guide here:
