Before we talk about how to target each type of search and whether it’s even possible, let’s first talk about how people usually identify them.
Historically, SEO professionals have looked for certain words or phrases in the query to infer the type of search. These are known as keyword modifiers. For example, if a query contains modifiers like “buy” or “purchase,” that’s almost certainly a transactional query.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Here’s a cheat sheet of modifiers similar to what many people use:
If you’re using a keyword research tool like Keywords Explorer, you can use these modifiers to find keywords that fall into each bucket. Just search for a topic, go to one of the keyword ideas reports, then add the keyword modifiers to the “Include” filter.
SIDENOTE. Make sure to choose “any” not “all” when doing this.
If you’re looking for informational keywords, an even quicker method is to use the Questions report, which shows keywords phrased as questions (i.e., including modifiers like “what,” “how,” “where,” “when,” etc.)
Although this methodology works for identifying some of the keywords that fall into each bucket, it’s far from foolproof because some queries aren’t so obvious.
For example, take a keyword like “ideal protein.” From the query alone, it’s impossible to know what the searcher is looking for. Are they looking to buy a product called Ideal Protein (transactional), information about the ideal amount of protein to consume each day (informational), or is there a company called Ideal Protein (navigational)?
It’s anyone’s guess.
Looking for keyword modifiers can also lead to flat-out incorrect identifications.
Take a keyword like “best buy laptops.” If you decided that this was a transactional query because it contains the word “buy,” you’d be wrong. Best Buy is an American consumer electronics company, which is what searchers are looking for here.
So if looking at the query itself doesn’t really help matters, what’s the solution?
Some SEO professionals use the presence of SERP features to identify the type of search. For example, if there’s a featured snippet in the search results, that probably indicates an informational query.