To tell whether a keyword’s intent matches your page before you write, pull the live SERP and read it, because the results Google already ranks are its published answer to what the query means. Don’t infer intent from the words in the keyword. “How to fix a leak” and “leak repair” look related to a tool but can return completely different pages, and the wording will mislead you where the SERP won’t.
Here is the check, and it takes a few minutes. Open the term in a fresh incognito window and look at the top five to ten results along three lines. First, content type: are these blog posts, product pages, service pages, comparisons? Second, format: how-to guides, listicles, definitions, step-by-step? Third, angle: do the titles lean on “for beginners,” “best,” a year, “free,” some particular framing? Whatever dominates those top positions is the shape Google has settled on for the query, drawn from years of watching what searchers click and stay on. Check the SERP features too, since a featured snippet wants a direct answer while a shopping or local pack signals a different intent altogether.
Then hold your planned page against that pattern. If you meant to write a long explainer and the SERP is wall-to-wall product pages, the intent doesn’t match, and writing it anyway means publishing something that won’t rank. Read the SERP first and match your page to what it shows, before you draft a single word, instead of going by the keyword’s wording or a tool’s intent label.