Month 1: New blender-review site. Conventional wisdom said go straight for the money pages — "best blender for smoothies," high commercial intent. So I did. 15 buyer-intent posts out of the gate.
Month 5: ranked nowhere. Those keywords are war zones — established sites with 500 referring domains owned every slot. My fresh domain had no chance competing on the hardest terms first.
The turn: I pivoted to info content. "Why is my smoothie gritty," "can you blend hot soup" — low competition, low intent, but rankable on a young site.
Month 8: those info posts ranked, built topical authority, and internally linked up to my buyer pages. THEN the buyer pages started climbing — Google now trusted the domain on blenders.
Month 11: traffic 0 → 18k, revenue $0 → $1,100. The info posts I'd dismissed were the on-ramp.
The takeaway: on a new site, transactional-first is a wall you can't climb yet. Info content is the ladder — it ranks early, builds the topical authority that makes your money pages winnable later. Earn the right to compete on money terms.
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Info content vs transactional: which to build first
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