Intent research vs. keyword research – This day in search marketing history

A shift from keyword research to intent research, plus: search engines taking data from SEOs, PPC spending/budget cuts, and more.

In 2020, Frédéric Dubut of Bing told us: “Keyword research are probably going to become slowly obsolete and you’ll need to switch to intent research as a practice.”

Barry Schwartz asked Google’s John Mueller about Dubut’s statement. Here’s what Mueller said:

• “There’s probably always gonna be a little bit of room for keyword research because you’re kind of providing those words to users. And even if search engines are trying to understand more than just those words, showing specific words to users can make it a little bit easier for them to understand what your pages are about and can sometimes drive a little bit of that conversion process.”

So, is keyword research obsolete yet? In 2023, there definitely has been a significant shift in the way SEOs think about user intent, or the search intent behind a query. But keyword research is still far from obsolete.