Butterfly Effect: How Core Updates Make Subtle User Intent Changes
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Sites can lose significant organic traffic from Core Updates without obvious patterns when analyzing rank changes. One hidden cause is subtle intent shifts.
Two outdated models prevent us from seeing what’s really going on.
One, we often think of user intent as transactional, navigational, informational, and commercial. But today, user intent is much more refined and specific.
Two, not all spots in the search results are the same. Google splits the top results into dominant, common, and minor intent.
Unless we’re talking about long-tail keywords with a very clear intent, keywords can have several meanings. Some people searching for “ai ecommerce,” for example, want to know how AI is used in ecommerce, while others want to know how ecommerce changes due to AI. Subtle but different.