Website Structure and Keyword Intent

[Ross Sedawie]

Hi all,
I own a series of websites, one of them being www.opalauctions.com and I have been doing work on website structure and really trying to understand how I can satisfy different search intents with keywords. I want to run through an example that I have been going through that hopefully I can get some help with.
Seed keyword: Black Opal short tail, big search volume
Information Intent keywords: What is black Opal, black opal meaning, black opal properties etc -> We did have these answered pretty successfully in our blogs (URL /learn)
Sales intent keywords: Black Opal for sale, loose Black Opal etc -> We usually rank well for these on our sales pages, but recently have been dropping in rank.

When I go to SEMRush, and when I look at SERP's, the term "Black Opal" is shown as both Commercial and Information. However, in the actual SERP's the pages that are doing well are sales pages, not informational page.

The sales pages that look to be ranking well, all seem to have both products and informational on the same page.
This would be a good example: https://blackopaldirect.com/category/opal/black-opal/

It seems to me like Google is not really sure of the intent of the short tail keyword "Black Opal" so it just tries to deliver pages that contain info and products to satisfy the end user.

So my question is, what sort of structure should I be looking at going forward
a) Separate sales and information pages that share the same seed keyword. I feel like if I do this, then I wont be in the running to rank for the keyword "Black Opal" since my sales page would be thin on information content

b) Create a single sales page that has everything on it. Products, information, FAQ's.

I am seeing this type of things for just about every keyword in my niche. Emerald, Ruby, tanzanite etc. And the sites that rank the highest, don't have a separate blog section that talks about each of the stones individually. 

Would love to hear thoughts and thank you in advance

PS. Thanks Mike for making this forum!

[Mike Friedman]

In a case like this @Ross Sedawie, I would say don't try to out clever yourself. If the majority of the top ranking pages are a combination of informational and commercial, then that's how I would structure my pages as well. 

It makes a lot of sense on a broader term like that. You really don't know if a person is looking to buy a black opal or if they are looking for a wiki style page to learn about where black opals come from.