“What is a WordPress cache” and “hire someone to optimise WordPress” belong to the same field and demand entirely different pages. The first person wants an explanation; the second has come to make a decision. Show the second an explainer and they leave; show the first an enquiry form and they leave. Search intent is the old, unglamorous concept that handles this difference, and it is the step most often skipped.
The four intents
Informational queries want to know something: “what is a WordPress cache”, “how to optimise images”. The answer is an explainer, and the goal is credibility rather than conversion.
Navigational queries want to reach a specific place — “WordPress admin login URL”, or anything containing your brand name. Short and precise beats thorough here.
Commercial investigation sits just before the decision: “backup plugin comparison”, “alternatives to X”. What is needed is not persuasion but material to compare with — what differs under which conditions, and which option suits which case.
Transactional queries have come to act: “WordPress optimisation service”, “how much does X cost”. These readers need scope, price and a way to start. Long explanation at this point is an obstacle, not a service.
The fastest way to identify intent
Do not guess. Run the query yourself — it is quicker and more reliable, because the character of the top results is the intent the search engine has decided on. If all ten results are explainers, that query is informational, and a service page will struggle to take a position there no matter how good it is.
Look at the format of those results too. A page of list articles means the question wants items enumerated; tables and comparisons mean it wants a comparison. Maps or shopping results appearing alongside may mean this is not a query you can compete for with an article at all.
The check takes a few minutes, and it is always cheaper than discovering the format was wrong after writing the whole piece.
A page serving two intents serves neither
The commonest mistake is dropping pricing and a booking button into the middle of an explainer. The instinct is reasonable — capture the conversion while they are here. In practice the informational reader hits that point, reads it as advertising and leaves, while the transactional reader has to scroll past several hundred words to reach the price and leaves as well.
The fix is not to abandon conversion but to hand it on. Let the explainer explain to the end, then place one link to the transactional page. Both pages then serve their own intent fully while forming a single path.
What to build for each intent
Articles and pillar archives for informational; short, precise pages for navigational; conditional comparisons and an FAQ for commercial investigation; a service page with explicit scope and price for transactional. Sketch your site as those four layers and the empty one becomes obvious immediately.
On most business sites, informational and transactional exist and commercial investigation is missing. The real cost of that hole is that people at the point of deciding cannot find anything to compare with, so they go and compare somewhere else — and decide there.
Linking intent-specific pages into one structure is covered in the designing a content hub series, and the mechanics of indexing and ranking live in the SEO archive. For a worked example of a transactional page, you are welcome to read our own optimization program page.