This question is more complicated than meets the eye, since not all viking raids were alike. I usually break the Viking Age into three sub-periods, each with its own style of raiding:
790s-830s. Small-scale viking raids of only a handful of ships each show up and seasonally exploit the divided kingdoms of Britain and the civil wars of the Carolingian Continent.
830s-870s. Viking armies grow larger, cobbled together from the smaller units. Instead of being seasonal raiders, they're now standing affairs. They often spend their winters on estuary islands or in D-shaped camps with their ships along a riverbank. Some of these camps show evidence of local craftsmen arriving and setting up shop to make money off of these new squatter elites.
870s-1060s. The vikings start to usurp powers from the kings they've toppled. Perhaps they're inspired by the craftsmen who expect them to behave just like their old royal patrons. Many of the Norse abandon sea-raiding and instead become powerful landowners making further money through taxing the craftsmen and their trades, and minting new coins to collect these taxes. In the case of York (UK), the Norse king minted coins with his face on one side and the local bishop on the other, suggesting that there was accommodation if not outright adoption of the traditional trappings of Christian kingship. Of course, the older kingdoms of Western Europe had also evolved during this time. The one remaining contender in England—the kingdom of Wessex—got its act together and eventually knocked out the York-based Danelaw (although a later invasion in 1066 is credited with fatiguing Harald's army and contributing to his defeat by the Norman William the Conqueror). In Francia, the kings took up a policy of "if you can't beat them, join them" and allowed the Norman vikings to become a regular part of their kingdom.
So while the word viking originally meant something akin to pirate, the Norse colonizers of Western Europe in the 900s and early-1000s looked much more like their Western European counterparts than their Scandinavian ancestors. They had adopted locals lifestyles—including practices of social stratification and military organization—and they had begun to evolve alongside their Western European contemporaries. We might call all the Norse-speaking adventurers of this age "Vikings", but they had changed over time, and so too their violent habits of raiding had transformed into new habits of exerting power over people and exploiting them through more Westernized styles of rulership.