Level: Intermediate
Search intent — informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional — determines what kind of page should actually target a given keyword, and tagging it explicitly avoids building the wrong content type.
The Excel Technique
Similar to journey-stage tagging, an intent column can be populated with a nested IF formula checking for intent signal words ("how," "buy," "vs," "near me"), then manually reviewed and corrected, since automated intent tagging is never fully reliable on its own.
Example Scenario
Reviewing a batch of 500 keywords tagged by intent, you notice 40 terms initially planned as blog content are actually transactional, "ready to buy" queries — meaning a product or landing page would serve that traffic better than an article would.
Where This Fits in Your Keyword Research Process
Because intent tagging often needs a second, manual review pass on top of any formula-based first attempt, having the tags clearly visible as a suffix on each term makes that manual review faster than cross-referencing a separate column.
Next step: Use Add Suffix from SeoWolf's Notepad to append an intent tag as a suffix to each keyword in your working list, keeping the tag visible directly on the term itself as you manually review and correct the automated first-pass intent tagging in Excel.