Not all searches have the same intent, and Google knows it.

Google does everything it can to infer what the searchers intent is and match the results to that intent;  it’s the crux of the value they offer users.

While this is a nuanced practice executed by artificial intelligence and vast algorithms, it breaks down into three main categories:

1. Informational:  the searcher wants information on a topic to edify their understanding, help them complete a task, and assist in making further decisions about what content to access.
2. Transactional:  the searcher’s intent indicates an interest in buying a product or hiring a service.  Content offered is intended for consumers.
3. Navigational:  the searcher is looking for a brand or service they’re aware of.  For example, someone looking for a house might just search directly on “Zillow”.

From this simple construct the more nuanced, complex search qualifiers are developed.

There is also, however, another important tendency to note with informational and transactional searches.  To point, take a look at this search query that we target “real estate agent marketing”.

It doesn’t take much analysis of this SERP to see a pretty distinct dividing line.  The 4 listings at the top, which are the pay-per-click-advertisements, offer transactional content.  However, of the 10 organic listings underneath, 9 are informational content.

The transactional results go to pages were agencies are selling services.  The organic results go to articles with tips and ideas about how to market a real estate agency.

There are two important generalizations we can make here.

First, few businesses use PPC advertising for informational content.  We can speculate that this is because with PPC ads, you must provide content that’s a strong match with your conversion tactics.  To get ROI from paid search, you need to have promotional material more likely to convert.

Second, it’s becoming clearer that Google often favors informational content with organic results.  The search query “real estate agent marketing” doesn’t necessarily lean towards informational intent (we’ve usually assumed this was a transactional query from someone looking for a service), but the results totally favor informational content.

Even a clearly transactional search like “buy a new computer”  offers Google shopping (transactional), with all of the organic results leaning towards informational content (how to buy a computer, comparisons, reviews…instead of product pages with computers to buy).

It’s also worth noting that this distinction between paid and organic results seems to have increased in Spring of 2016, when Google removed the PPC ads from the right sidebar and instead starting placing four paid ads at the top of the page.

Nobody ever knows exactly what Google is up to.  But it is a good SEO practice to recognize trends like these.

We can speculate.  It seems Google is more inclined to organically rank informational content created to be helpful and useful – rather than promotional – in organic results.  It’s increasingly difficult to organically rank pages that are strictly promotional content.  If you want that content to rank in SERPs, you have to pay to advertise.

This is watershed for SEO practices.  In the past, informational content was primarily used to rank the main domain – which was a transactional page.

Today, high information quality articles and blog posts are the pages that are ranking directly on page one of SERPs.  For many organic results, you’ll find it’s not the homepage of a website, but rather the page with information that most closely matches the query that ranks.

Conclusion:  Google has started to favor relevant, useful, informational content in organic search results.  It’s the default “intent” they are giving the user, whether or not that was their actual intent.

This means that more than ever, businesses that want to do lead generation online using the free, organic listings need to develop an informational marketing strategy.  The best way to capture this traffic is to understand how your target audience researches their buying decision, then create content that’s helpful in that research.

By doing so, of course, you can slip in your branding and promotional messages – and get the lead into your sales funnel.  But they have to be dealt with as consumers in the research phase of the buying cycle.  If you try to hit them with promotions too early, your content will never rank in organic search.

Every search query is different, of course.  But at this point, the informational focus of SEO looks to be a clear trend.