What a Search Is For

1Google's business

Google is an advertising company that runs a search engine. The search engine is free to use. The money comes from advertisers who pay to appear next to the results, and almost all of that is sold on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis: the advertiser pays Google only when a searcher clicks the ad. An ad that is shown and ignored costs the advertiser nothing and earns Google nothing.

That arrangement decides everything else about how Google behaves. Advertisers will pay for a click only while searchers keep coming to Google. Searchers keep coming only while the unpaid results answer their question faster than any other way of finding out. So the quality of the unpaid results is the product Google protects, even though it earns nothing directly from a click on them. A results page full of pages that do not answer the question sends the searcher to a different engine, and the ad revenue goes with them.

The word for a page that ranks by trickery rather than by answering the question is spam, and Google treats it as a direct threat to the business. Google publishes a list of the tricks it acts against, called the spam policies, and it enforces them two ways. Automated systems detect patterns and lower the pages that show them. People on Google's web spam team review sites by hand and can apply a manual action, a penalty recorded against a site that removes some or all of its pages from the results until the owner fixes the problem and asks for a review. Module 08 covers both in detail.

This matters to Hermetic because the site has 57 pages about the Metro Richmond Zoo, Maymont, Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond Raceway and ten Henrico neighborhoods. They exist so that the word "Richmond" appears on the site many times. The spam policies name a category called doorway pages, pages built to rank for particular searches and route the visitor to a different destination. Whether the 57 pages fall into that category is not known yet; module 04 looks at them with Search Console data in hand. The general point stands: a tactic that helps us rank without helping the searcher is a tactic Google pays a team to find.

2The search loop

A query is the string of words a person types or speaks into the search box. The query is the only thing Google has to work with, and it is a poor description of what the person wants. Four things happen around it, in order, and understanding them tells you what a page has to do.

Step one is a need. The office manager at a Richmond law firm has nobody receiving email. Step two is the words she chooses for it, and she chooses few: "outlook not working" is typical. There is no sentence, no question mark, and no mention of who she is or where she is. Step three is the results page, which she scans for a few seconds. Step four is the decision: the question is answered and she stops, or it is not and she searches again with different words. The second search is almost always longer than the first, because she adds what the first one left out. "Outlook not working" becomes "outlook not working after password change" or, when she gives up on fixing it herself, "IT support Richmond".

Two things follow for anyone who writes a page. First, the words on the page have to match the words in the query at the step where the person is ready to act. The managed IT page cannot help with "outlook not working" and should not try; a blog post can. The managed IT page is for the moment the words change to "IT support Richmond". Second, the loop can run over days. A business owner may search a problem on Monday, read a post of ours, and search our name on Thursday. The Monday page and the Thursday page are different pages with different jobs, which is what the next section is about.

3The four search intents

Search intent is what the person typing the query wants to happen when the results appear. The query shows the words; the intent is the purpose behind them. Four kinds cover almost every search a Richmond business makes that could end at a Hermetic page.

Navigational

A navigational search is one where the person already knows which company or site they want and is using Google as the address book. "Hermetic networks" is the Hermetic example. The person typing it was referred by a client, saw a proposal, met Jeff at a networking breakfast, or is a client looking for the support phone number. The homepage has to answer in one screen: who we are, where we are, how to reach us. Nearly every click on this search goes to the company being named, so the value of each visit is high and the cost of losing one is high too. Today the homepage title reads "IT Support & Cybersecurity Services | Richmond & Virginia Beach" and names no company, so a person who searched for us by name sees a result that does not say our name back to them. Module 03 and the Rank Math course fixes that title.

Informational

An informational search is one where the person wants to learn something and has nothing to buy yet. "Which form of MFA is the most secure" and "what is co-managed IT" are Hermetic examples; so is "outlook not working" from the loop above. The information is the goal, and the person may read one page and leave satisfied. These searches rarely produce a call the same week. They are still worth a page, because this is where a business owner first meets a company's name. The owner who read our MFA post in March is the one whose Thursday search in June is "hermetic networks". A business that writes only for people ready to buy is absent from the first meeting and hands it to a competitor who was present.

Transactional

A transactional search is one where the person wants to do something: hire a company, buy a product, book an appointment, sign up. Money need not change hands on the spot. "Managed IT services Richmond VA" and "cybersecurity company Richmond" are the Hermetic examples, and they are the searches the whole site exists for. The person has decided they need a provider and is choosing one. The page that answers has to say what the service is, who it is for, what it includes, where we work and how to start, and each service gets one such page. Today managed IT has three pages aimed at this one search: /managed-services/, /managed-it-support-richmond-va/ and /managed-it-services-in-richmond-expertise-to-elevate-your-business/. Google shows one page per site for most searches, so three candidates means Google chooses, and the visits and links that could build one page's standing are spread over three.

Local

A local search is one where the person wants something near a place, either where they are standing or a place they name. "IT support near me" and "IT company Henrico VA" are the Hermetic examples. Local differs from the other three in kind: it is a quality a search has in addition to being navigational, informational or transactional. "Hermetic networks Richmond" is navigational and local. "Managed IT services Richmond VA" is transactional and local. Google treats local searches differently on the results page, adding a map and a block of three nearby businesses called the local pack, and that block is filled from the Google Business Profile (GBP), the free listing a business manages at business.google.com, and from nothing on the website. Whether Hermetic's profile is claimed and who manages it is not known yet. For an MSP that serves Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield, almost every search that produces a call is local, so the profile carries as much weight as any page on the site.

4The three search kinds in the Rank Math course

The plugin course, SEO with Rank Math, sorts searches into three kinds rather than four: a service plus a place, our name, and a problem. The three are a working shorthand for the four intents, chosen because each one maps to one kind of page on the site. The table lines the two vocabularies up so that a term from either course means the same thing.

The one search the three-kind shorthand leaves implicit is the pure local search with no service named and no company named: "IT support near me", or "computer repair" typed on a phone in Short Pump. The Rank Math course handles it inside their local SEO modules, Rank Math module 08, because the answer is the Google Business Profile rather than a page. The page map that the Rank Math course builds in its module 02 lists one page per search kind, and the list you write at the end of this module is the first draft of it.

5How people type a search

People type searches in a way nobody writes anything else, and the words on a page have to meet them where they are. Four habits cover most of it.

The consequence for a page is that the words a client uses have to be on it, in the places Google and the reader look first: the title, the main heading, the first paragraph and the headings below. The words Hermetic uses internally are often different. A technician writes "endpoint" in a Syncro ticket; the client who opened the ticket said "my computer". We say "MSP" and "managed services"; the office manager searching says "IT company" or "IT support" or "computer guy". We write "backup and disaster recovery"; she types "office backup" or "cloud backup for business". Both sets of words belong on the service page, and the client's words go first.

The same rule rejects a sentence like the one on the homepage today: "Elevate your business with Hermetic Networks' expert IT services". Nobody types "elevate your business". The description spends its first four words on a phrase no searcher uses, and Google shows those words under the result. Module 05 builds the list of words clients use, from Search Console, from tickets, from Nutshell notes and from asking the technicians what clients say on the phone. For now, notice the gap between the words on the site and the words in the loop in section 2.

6Organic and paid results

A results page has two kinds of listing that look alike and work differently. A paid result is an advertisement. It carries a label that reads "Sponsored" at the time of writing, it appears because an advertiser bid on the words in the query, and the advertiser pays each time it is clicked. An organic result is an unpaid listing that Google placed because it judged the page the best answer available. Nobody pays per click on it, and nobody can buy a position in it. SEO is the work of earning organic positions. Paid search is a separate discipline with a separate budget, and this course leaves it alone except where the two appear on the same screen.

The two differ in what happens when the money stops. A paid listing disappears the day the campaign ends. An organic position stays as long as the page keeps deserving it, which can be years. The two also differ in cost per visit: a paid click costs the bid price every time, and an organic click costs the time already spent writing the page and nothing more. That is the case for doing SEO at all.

Where the clicks go on a given results page is a question Google does not answer in public. Studies by SEO firms exist and go out of date within a year or two, so this module quotes none of them. Two checks you can make yourself are more useful. First, search "managed IT services Richmond VA" on your phone and count how many screens you scroll before the first organic result appears beneath the ads and the local pack. That distance is what an organic position is competing against. Second, ask the last five new clients how they found Hermetic, and write down their words. If any of them say "I searched for it", ask what they typed. Nutshell's lead source field, where it has been filled in, is the same information already written down.

For a local transactional search the order on the page is usually ads, then the local pack, then the organic results. The local pack is an unpaid listing drawn from Google Business Profiles, so a Richmond MSP has two unpaid places to appear on that page: in the pack, through the profile, and in the organic list, through a service page. The Rank Math course's local SEO modules work on the first; most of this course works on the second.

7One search, many results pages

The results page you see for a query is one of many Google builds for the same words. Three things change it: the device, the searcher's location, and what Google knows about the searcher. Each one has a consequence for how you build pages and for how you check whether they rank.

Phone and desktop

Google states in its documentation that most people now reach Search from a phone, and since 2020 it has used mobile-first indexing, which means the copy of a page Google reads, stores and ranks is the one its phone-sized crawler fetches. If the phone version of a page hides text that the desktop version shows, Google ranks the page on the smaller text. The results page on a phone is also a different shape: one column, ads and the local pack at the top, and the first organic result often below the first screen. So the page has to work on a phone first: readable without zooming, the phone number tappable, the contact form usable with a thumb, and fast on a cellular connection. Module 07 checks what the Beaver Builder layouts cost in load time. The Google Business Profile matters more on a phone, because a tap on "Call" in the local pack bypasses the website altogether.

Location

A local search is answered for the place the searcher is in. "IT support" typed in Henrico and "IT support" typed in Virginia Beach return different local packs and, often, different organic results, because Google adds the searcher's location to the query. This is why a service page should name the places Hermetic serves in words, and why the Google Business Profile address decides which local packs we can appear in at all. A business with one Richmond address does not appear in the Virginia Beach local pack, whatever the website says.

Personalized and adaptive results

Google also changes results based on the searcher. A personalized result is one shaped by the searcher's own history: a site they visited often moves up for them, and a signed-in account carries that history across devices. An adaptive result is one shaped by the searches made a moment earlier: a person who searches two competing IT companies in a row is in research mode, and Google may answer the second search with a comparison block or a carousel of similar companies rather than the one company named. The searcher does not see any of this happening.

8The site today against the four intents

The page sitemap at www.hermeticnetworks.com listed 139 pages on 2026-09-29. Sorting them by the intent each one could answer shows where the site is heavy, where it is thin, and where it is serving nobody who could become a client.

Navigational. The 14 utility, about and case-study pages include the About Us page and the contact and testimonial pages a person searching our name would want. The homepage, the first answer to that search, has a title that names two cities and no company, and the structured data on it describes a WebSite and a WebPage with no Organization or LocalBusiness block, so Google is given no machine-readable statement of who owns the site. Whether the Google Business Profile is claimed is not known yet. The navigational intent is served by pages that exist and underserved by what they say.

Informational. The 148 posts carry this intent, and the newest was updated 2026-09-21, so somebody is still writing. Which questions they answer, and whether any of them is the page a Richmond business owner finds when she types a problem, is not known until Search Console shows which queries bring visits. The 84 tag archives and 18 categories, including one named "uncategorized", are lists of links rather than answers and serve no intent of their own.

Transactional. 30 service pages with no place in the URL, 21 service pages with a place in the URL and 4 industry pages make 55 pages aimed at the search that produces a call. The navigation lists ten services, so 55 pages cover ten services, and the surplus is duplication: three managed IT pages, three backup and disaster recovery pages including one whose URL ends in -old, two VoIP pages, and a cybersecurity page each for nowhere in particular, for Richmond and for Virginia Beach. Two slugs are misspelled, /phising-protection-service/ and /vulnerablity-assessment-service/, so a person who types the service correctly matches neither. The intent is oversupplied with pages and undersupplied with one good page per service.

Local. The 13 city landing pages and the 21 placed service pages aim at local intent by putting a town name in the URL. Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield are one metro to a searcher and to Google, so thirteen pages split one place into thirteen thin ones. The local pack is fed by the Google Business Profile, which no page on the site can substitute for.

None of the four. The 57 tourism and city-guide pages answer a real intent, an informational one, for a person planning a visit to Maymont or the Richmond Raceway. That person does not need an IT provider, and nothing on the page leads toward one. 57 of 139 pages, more than a third of the page sitemap, serve an intent Hermetic has no business in. Three more pages, /thank-you/, /thank-you-for-schedule-an-appointment/ and /opt-out-preferences/, serve no searcher at all and are in the sitemap anyway. Module 04 decides what to do about them with data.

9Do this now

1. Open a new sheet and name it Searches by intent. Make four rows, headed Navigational, Informational, Transactional and Local. In each row write one search a Richmond business would make, in the words a client would use. For the Informational row, open Syncro and read the last ten tickets' first lines; pick the problem a client described most plainly and write it as they would type it. For the Transactional row, use the service Hermetic most wants to sell this quarter plus "Richmond VA".
2. On your phone, in a private browser window, run each of the four searches. For each one write down, in a fifth column, what appears before the first organic result: ads, a local pack, a People also ask block, a map. Note whether Hermetic appears anywhere on the first screen, and screenshot the page. This is the baseline for module 04, and today it is a yes or no per search with no numbers.
3. Run the same four searches on your laptop, signed in to your normal Google account. Write down any difference from the phone results in a sixth column. The differences you see are personalization and device at work on your own searches.
4. Open https://www.hermeticnetworks.com/page-sitemap.xml. For each of the four searches, write in a seventh column the URL of the Hermetic page that should answer it. Where more than one page could, list them all. The Transactional row will have at least two URLs today for most services.
5. Open Nutshell and look at the lead source on the last ten won leads. Write down how many came from search and, where a note records it, what the person typed or said. If the field is empty on most of them, write that down too; it becomes a process change for the sales conversation.
6. Read the sheet once as a whole and write one sentence under it: which intent the site serves worst today and why you think so. Keep the sheet. Module 05 starts its topic list from it, and the Rank Math course's page map starts from the same four rows.

10Review questions

1. Google earns nothing when someone clicks an organic result. Why does it spend money finding and removing pages that rank by trickery?

   A.Spam pages compete with the advertisers Google sells space to, so removing them raises the price Google can charge for each ad click. B.Searchers keep using Google only while the unpaid results answer the question, and advertisers pay only while searchers keep coming. C.Google is required by law to remove pages that rank by trickery, and the web spam team exists to meet that duty. D.Spam pages are large and slow to crawl, and removing them lowers the cost of running the search engine.
   Answer

   Advertisers pay per click only while searchers keep using Google, and searchers keep using it only while the unpaid results answer the question. A page that ranks without answering makes the results worse and sends searchers elsewhere, taking the ad clicks with them. Spam enforcement protects the ad revenue indirectly by protecting the reason people search on Google at all.

   Show the answer
2. An office manager types "backup richmond". Which intent is it?

   A.Transactional and local: a service word next to a city name means the person wants to hire a backup vendor in Richmond. B.Informational: the person wants to read about backup software, since nothing in the search names a company to hire. C.The words do not settle it; read the results page Google built for them and let a local pack or help articles show which intent Google assigned. D.Navigational: the person is looking for a company named Backup Richmond and is using Google as the address book.
   Answer

   The words alone do not say. The search could be transactional, for a backup service, informational, about backup software, or unrelated to IT. The way to find out is to read the results page Google already built for those words: a local pack and vendor pages mean Google reads it as transactional and local; help articles mean informational. Intent is decided by what the page shows, since that reflects what earlier searchers clicked.

   Show the answer
3. Jeff searches "managed IT services Richmond" at the office and sees Hermetic third. A prospect in Chesterfield runs the same search and sees no Hermetic on the first screen. Which result is correct?

   A.Both are correct for the person who saw them, and the ranking to use is Search Console's average position across every searcher. B.The prospect's result is correct, because a stranger with no history of us sees the ranking as Google holds it. C.Jeff's result is correct, because he searched from the office, which is the address Google holds for Hermetic. D.Neither is correct until both run the search in a private browser window, which removes location and history and shows the ranking.
   Answer

   Both are correct for the person who saw them. Jeff's result is personalized by an account that visits the site daily and located at the office; the prospect's is located in Chesterfield with no history of us. Neither is the ranking. The measure to use is Search Console's average position for that query, which averages across every searcher who saw the page, and it is not available until a property is connected.

   Show the answer
4. A blog post about MFA gets visits every month and has never produced a phone call. Someone proposes deleting it. Should they?

   A.Yes: a page that has drawn visits for months without one phone call has had its chance, and those visits belong on a service page instead. B.Keep it only if it is rewritten to sell managed IT, since every page on the site should aim at the search that produces a call. C.No: visits are the measure of any page, and a post that draws visits every month is ranking and should be left exactly as it is. D.No, on this evidence: the post answers an informational search, and the measures are whether it answers well and links to the related service page.
   Answer

   No, on the evidence given. The post answers an informational search, and a same-week phone call is the wrong measure for that intent. Its job is to be the first page a business owner reads from us, so that a later search is for our name. The right questions are whether the post answers the question well and whether it links to the related service page. Delete it only if Search Console shows nobody arriving at it from search and nothing on it leads anywhere.

   Show the answer
5. The homepage description begins "Elevate your business with Hermetic Networks' expert IT services". Which of the four intents does that sentence answer, and what would a searcher have typed to match it?

   A.Navigational: the sentence names Hermetic Networks, so a person who typed "hermetic networks" sees the name they searched for. B.None of them: no searcher types "elevate your business", so the sentence matches no query at the words that matter. C.Transactional: "expert IT services" names the service a buyer wants, so a person who typed "it services richmond" matches it. D.Informational: the sentence promises to explain how IT services help a business, so it answers a person who typed "do I need an MSP".
   Answer

   None of them. No searcher types "elevate your business", so the sentence matches no query at the words that matter. A navigational searcher typed "hermetic networks" and wants the name, place and phone number; a transactional searcher typed a service and a place and wants to see those words. The description should open with the words those two people typed.

   Show the answer
6. The 57 tourism pages answer an informational intent for someone planning a visit to Maymont. Why does that not count as serving the informational intent in section 8's chart?

   A.The module's four intents are the ones that can end at a Hermetic page a client wants, and a visitor planning a trip to Maymont is never that client. B.Informational intent is carried by the 148 blog posts, and only pages in the post sitemap can be counted toward it. C.The pages are doorway pages under Google's spam policies, and a page that breaks a spam policy cannot be counted as serving any intent. D.The pages answer a question for a searcher outside Virginia, and informational intent counts only when the searcher is in Richmond.
   Answer

   The four intents in this module are the four that can end at a Hermetic page a client wants. A person researching Maymont has a need the page satisfies and then leaves, and nothing about that need connects to IT support. The pages serve a real searcher who can never become a client, so they count as serving none of Hermetic's intents. Whether they also do harm, and what to do with them, waits for Search Console data in module 04.

   Show the answer

11Glossary

Search engine optimization (SEO)

The work of making a page on our site the one Google shows, in the unpaid results, for the searches a Richmond business makes when it needs IT help.

Query

The words a person types or speaks into the search box. Usually a few words with no grammar.

Search intent

What the person typing the query wants to happen when the results appear. The four kinds are navigational, informational, transactional and local.

Navigational search

A search for a specific company or site the person already knows. "Hermetic networks."

Informational search

A search to learn something, with nothing to buy yet. "Which form of MFA is the most secure."

Transactional search

A search to hire, buy, book or sign up. "Managed IT services Richmond VA."

Local search

A search for something near a place, in addition to being one of the other three kinds. "IT support near me."

Refinement

A second search that adds words to the first after the results missed. Longer queries come from people further along.

Pay-per-click (PPC)

The model Google sells ads on: the advertiser pays only when a searcher clicks the ad.

Paid result

An advertisement on the results page, labeled "Sponsored", placed because an advertiser bid on the query's words.

Organic result

An unpaid listing Google placed because it judged the page the best available answer. No position in it can be bought.

Local pack

The map and block of three nearby businesses Google shows for a local search. Filled from Google Business Profiles.

Google Business Profile (GBP)

The free listing a business manages at business.google.com: name, address, phone, hours, category, reviews. Feeds the local pack.

Spam

A page that ranks by trickery rather than by answering the query. Google publishes spam policies and enforces them with automated systems and manual actions.

Manual action

A penalty a Google reviewer records against a site that removes some or all of its pages from results until the problem is fixed and reviewed.

Mobile-first indexing

Google's practice since 2020 of reading, storing and ranking the phone version of a page.

Personalized result

A result changed by the searcher's own history and account. The reason your own search is a poor measure of ranking.

Google Search Console

Google's free tool showing which queries show our pages, how often they are clicked, and the average position across all searchers.

12Sources

• Google, How our business works: advertising revenue and the statement that advertisers pay when people click.
• Google Search Central, In-depth guide to how Google Search works: crawling, indexing and serving results.
• Google, How results are ranked: context and settings, including location and past search history, as inputs to the results shown.
• Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search: the list of practices Google acts against, including doorway pages.
• Google Search Central, Google Search Essentials: the technical requirements, spam policies and key best practices.
• Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content: content written for the searcher rather than for the engine.
• Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide: the words searchers use and where they belong on a page.
• Google Search Central, Mobile-first indexing best practices: the statement that most users now reach Search from a mobile device and that Google indexes the mobile version of a page.
• Google Search Console Help, Performance report: average position, and filtering by device and country.
• Google Search Console Help, Manual Actions report: what a manual action is and how it is lifted.
• Google, Google Business Profile Help: the profile is managed at business.google.com and feeds local results.
• Stephan Spencer, Eric Enge and Jessie Stricchiola, The Art of SEO, 4th edition (O'Reilly, early release 2021), chapter 1.
• Site facts from a crawl of www.hermeticnetworks.com on 2026-09-29: homepage source, sitemap_index.xml and its five child sitemaps, the navigation.

Documentation read 2026-10-01. Google changes often; where this page and the documentation disagree, the documentation is current.