Carl Poxon Explains Why Search Intent Beats Keyword Volume

What happens when you stop looking at SEO through the lens of keywords and start looking at it through the lens of people?

Carl Poxon, SEO Director Reflect Digital, joins E-Coffee with Experts to explore exactly that. Carl takes us through his unusual journey into SEO, from biomolecular science to hosting, media, and agency life, and shares how Google’s Panda and Penguin updates helped push the industry beyond the days of keyword stuffing and link spam.

A big part of the conversation is about understanding what people actually mean when they search. Carl shares a fascinating example from a UK building society, where the team was targeting a valuable mortgage term but discovered that first-time buyers weren’t searching for it because they didn’t know the terminology. It’s a simple example, but it highlights a much bigger point: search data can tell you what people type, but it doesn’t always tell you why they’re searching.

We also get into zero-click searches and why not every valuable search needs to result in a click. Carl explains how seemingly non-commercial searches can build familiarity and brand recall over time, using the “We Buy Any Car” campaign as a great example of how brand awareness can influence future search behavior.

And, of course, we talk about AI. From AI Overviews to LLM visibility, Carl shares how the shift toward AI-powered search is making traditional attribution harder, why branded search share is becoming an increasingly useful metric, and how SEOs can prove their impact when clicks and rankings no longer tell the full story.

If you’re trying to understand where SEO is heading, and how to build a strategy around real human behavior rather than just search volume, this episode is definitely worth a listen.