Intent Keywords and Search Keywords – What's the Difference?

John Whiteside

Building your intent strategy and finding and managing intent keywords is one of the big foundational elements of your 6sense instance. Intent data tells you what your buyers are thinking about, how that’s changing and trending, and what you need to bring to the table to be relevant to them. This is important when you’re planning your content and messaging, building your audience segments, and when your sellers are reaching out to in-market accounts!

One of the questions that comes up for many new 6sense customers is “Should we use our search keywords for this?” It’s a good question, but you want to be clear on the difference between intent keywords and search terms. They’re both powerful, they’re both useful, and they both capture intent signals… but they’re detecting different things and you need to use them differently. 

• Search keywords capture valuable moments to interact with one buyer based on a specific action they have taken – typing a match for your keyword into a search engine. You know what that buyer is thinking about in that moment, and you have an opportunity to make a connection. This is why you’ve run paid search campaigns and battled it out for the top organic positions for key terms. If you can connect at that moment, you can start a valuable relationship. 
• Intent keywords capture the context of research and content engagement in an account over time. 6sense intent keywords detect content interactions across a huge network of B2B website publishers and identify the topics that buyers are researching and learning about. As such, keyword intent signals give you insights into multiple people on the buying team. 
  • These signals begin long before they are Googling to find specific solutions, and continue throughout the buying process and beyond, capturing many activities that search data won’t show. What article on a B2B web site is a buyer reading because their boss sent it to them? What are the highlights that are making them click links in a newsletter from a trusted thought leader? These are big clues to the problems and needs they are thinking about. And intent keywords capture this across an entire account. 

So how do you choose the right intent keywords, how do you use them, and how do you make sure everybody on your revenue team understands what they’re looking at when they see them in the 6sense platform or in the Sales Intelligence iframe? Here are some guidelines. 

• Specificity matters… but in different ways. If you’re an IT security company, you might want to show your brand message every time someone searches for “web application security” or “intrusion detection.” But if you’re looking at intent, you may find 90% of the accounts in your ICP are always looking at content about web application security. That may not be a helpful signal to prioritize accounts for your BDRs. 
• Don’t sweat the same details. Search marketers spend a lot of time coming up with variations of search queries, thinking about what match types to invest in, and all the slight variations in word order and spelling that customers might use. But intent keywords are descriptions of topics. 6sense is watching intent signals across millions of web pages through our B2B publisher partners and interpreting the content through natural language processing AI. It’s not about exact matches and exact phrases and capturing that misspelling that everybody makes, it’s understanding the content – so your keywords can be simply describe topics. 
• Organization matters, and your search program is a great input into your intent strategy. Search marketers organize keywords into groups around buyer pain points, your product lines, product categories, and much more. This structure of your search program is really helpful in structuring your intent data – if you have search keyword groups around specific customer challenges, you probably will want similar intent keyword groups. 
• You can cast a wider net with intent, because you’re not paying for clicks. There are areas where you wouldn’t invest much effort or budget in search, but which are valuable for intent. For example, if you know that buyers in your category often are looking at related products at the same time as they would think about yours, those are good intent signals. In search, these adjacent categories might be too expensive to invest ad dollars or content creation resources into,,, but intent keywords are a great way to surface these insights.

Make sure your sellers understand what intent signals mean. When a BDR or a field seller is looking at account insights in the Sales Intelligence iframe, it’s natural for them to think of searches – it looks like search data, and we all use search all the time.

But thinking of intent signals as searches can affect the way they reach out to accounts, thinking that a specific action is taking place. Sellers need to understand how to use intent to customize their outreach to be relevant and helpful, not to respond to an action that may not have happened the way they think it did. 

Intent is a cornerstone of your account intelligence. If you want to dig deeper into intent strategy or keyword management, check out some of our RevCity resources or talk to your Customer Success Manager.

Here's a one page intent/search comparison for marketers and sellers that you can share with your team:

Intent v Search Quick Reference.pdf