One SEO professional was wondering about informational vs. transactional user intent.
John Mueller’s advice in a previous hangout was to separate these product pages and informational pages so they had clearer user intent.
The SEO professional was curious as to whether or not this user intent evaluation was done on a page-level basis.
John explained that it’s more of a page-level thing as opposed to site-level.
If it was site-level, it would be a lot harder for Google to figure out user intent because many, many sites have both transactional and informational pages throughout their sites.
Making it page-level means that Google will analyze that user intent based on the page itself per query, and not on a full-site basis.
Some SEO professionals have expressed that “Google ranks pages, not websites.” This information from John Mueller sure appears to confirm and back up this fact.
This conversation happens at approximately the 10:00 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 4 10:00
Hi, John, it’s me again. Yeah. Last time, we talked about some problems with the website where we have an e-commerce website where we have information and stuff and transactional stuff. And yeah, your advice was to separate these content a little bit and into transaction-oriented and information-oriented pages.
So I have another question. Regarding this, if you have a, let’s say, an e-commerce website, and you have a huge blog or a magazine or something like that, where you have loads of information and stuff, yeah, but it’s an old section. And on the other hand, you have all these product pages and categories and so on.
So would, would this huge blog with pure informational stuff, yeah, give the whole website kind of an informational touch or character so that Google says, “Oh, we’re not sure if this is a more, yeah, something where people can get information rather than buying stuff?” Or is this evaluation done on a per-page base?
John 11:22
I don’t think we have that documented or defined. But my understanding is that this is more of a page-level thing.
Because it’s, I mean, just purely from trying to think of as a practical way, like how you would implement it and look at websites overall, a lot of websites just have a mix of different kinds of content.
And then you try to figure out which of these pages match the searcher’s intent and try to rank those appropriately. So my, my feeling is this is something more that would be on a page-level rather than on a website-level.
SEO Professional 4 12:02
Okay, so we don’t have the, we don’t have the risk that, yeah, by adding more and more text content that we kind of dilute the product pages or something,
John 12:18
I don’t think so. I mean, you see that with news websites, often they have kind of the recent events, but they also have sections for maybe older events that took place, or I don’t know, 9/11, or for other big, big events, they kind of have an isolated archive section.
And those are very different intents, like if you want something really now that is happening, or if you want some kind of informational research, evergreen type content.
And there too, we kind of have to look at it on a per-page basis and not say, “Oh, this is a research website because there’s some research content here.” Alright, cool.
