In keyword research, it is important to know the difference between each type of keyword. There are three types of keywords: informational, transactional, and navigational. In this short essay, we will go through each of these types to explain their differences. The first type of keyword is informational, which is could be considered early on in the buyer’s journey. It is where the person searching is looking for information, and wants to learn information to then make a purchase. This type of keyword usually doesn’t lead to a purchase, but is more useful for the consumer to get knowledge about the product. Another thing users can use informational keywords for is to simply answer everyday questions that have no way to lead to a purchase. Moving on to the other keyword type, which is transactional. This is a keyword type that leads to purchases from consumers. Normally, when users search for keywords that are transactional, it will bring up extracted product information or paid ads for a product. This is because these users are looking to make a purchase, so having exact links to a product will allow the user to make a swift and quick purchase. The third type of keyword is navigational. This is where, when a user is searching, they are looking for a specific product or website. They want a certain brand with a certain model, which is super important to make sure that the brand they are searching for is at the top of the search page. As an example, if a user searches for Ugg Ultra Minis in chestnut brown, they want to see the Ugg page at the top of the results. It would be bad if the customer searched for those Ugg and Bearpaw versions that came up at the top of the search results. These three types of keywords dictate what a user will see when they search for something. If they are searching for background information, they are informational, want to make a purchase off a basic search, it’s transactional, and if they want to buy a specific product, it will be navigational.  Next in this post, I want to give specific examples of each type that are thorough to see the clear differences between each type of keyword. 

The first keyword type I want to give an example of is Informational. Adam is 30 years old and loves technology, football, and gaming. He wants to gain knowledge of technology companies other than Apple. He would be searching for keywords such as “Apple’s biggest competitor”, “new features on Samsungs’’, “who is better than Apple”. These searches would answer Adam’s question, and allow him to maybe more further into transactional keyword searching. 

The next example of a keyword strategy that we will go through is transactional. Betty is a 74-year-old lady who loves her grandkids, knitting, hand sewing, and baking. She wants to take her love of sewing to a new level, and start moving into getting a sewing machine. Betty searched on Google “best sewing machine”, “sewing machines for beginners”, or “sewing machines ranked”. With these searches, she would be able to find information on the different sewing machines with big companies such as Singer or Brother.

The final keyword type we will be looking at an example of is navigational. Tyler is 21 years old, a recent graduate, and loves the brand Nike. Tyler has a serious collection of all things Nike he especially loves their shoes. He follows Nike on all social media platforms to keep up on the latest drops and releases. Tyler frequently looks up the Nike website to see the new collections. When Tyler searches for Nike on Google, it will bring up the Nike website. It is especially important for Nike to make sure they rank on their own keyword so that if Tyler were to search up Nike, it wouldn’t bring up Puma or Adidas, which is Nike’s competitors.