What you are saying makes perfect sense and may be applicable to some industries but from my experience the informational searcher in many verticals can often be swamped with many choices, offers, etc that often dilute their decision make processes early in their buying cycle…that said, I really do believe that in many cases the transactional searcher is the one most businesses and marketers really desire to target depending on the buying/sales cycle of course…

Thanks again for stopping by

The fact is that the Transactional searcher is the one who has already been the Informational searcher (in order to discover precisely what he should buy), and is now shopping for the best deal. The one with the least profit markup in most cases.

If you’d only hooked him/her properly in the earlier research phases, the Informational searches, you could have sold them on your brand, expertise and value – even if it cost them a tad more for it.

But even though the transactional searcher is often the least profitable (assuming a site actually has some selling power), the most profitable is the Navigational searcher. That’s the customer who’s loyal to your brand, either through previous experiences (and thus a repeat customer with higher lifetime value), or through your excellence in positive branding in the informational research phses of his/her shopping process.

If you can make more and more people search directly for your brand, and your site, thus using navigational searches, then you totally own that market share, and those are the most profitable customers of all.

If you liked this piece by Peter Da Vanzo, then you’d probably love some of the earliest articles on landing paths etc published at his original blog (published way back in 2003, this is still more advanced than most SEOs can manage) – see Landing Paths: Reinventing Landing Pages (Archive.org copy as blog is under revamp).