The underlying goal behind a search query — informational, navigational, or transactional. Matching your page content to the intent behind a keyword is the foundation of effective SEO.
Keyword intent (also called search intent) refers to the underlying goal a person has when typing a query into a search engine. Google's primary mission is to match search results to user intent — so understanding intent is fundamental to ranking. The four main categories of search intent are: informational (looking to learn something), navigational (looking for a specific website), commercial (researching options before buying), and transactional (ready to buy or take action now).
For a service business, the most valuable keywords have transactional or commercial intent. 'Emergency plumber Minneapolis' is transactional — the searcher is ready to call someone right now. 'Best plumber Minneapolis' is commercial — they're comparing options. 'How much does a plumber charge' is informational — they're learning. Each intent type warrants a different type of page: service pages for transactional, comparison or review content for commercial, blog posts for informational.
Mismatching content to intent is one of the most common and expensive SEO mistakes. Building a blog post to rank for a transactional keyword (someone who wants to hire a plumber) sends them to content that doesn't help them take action. Building a sales page for an informational keyword (someone who just wants to know how plumbing works) will have high bounce rates because the content doesn't match what they came for.
Google has become increasingly good at inferring intent even from ambiguous queries. The best way to determine intent for a specific keyword is to search for it yourself and look at what results Google currently ranks — those pages show you what content type, format, and depth Google has determined matches the intent of that query.