For the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

How People Interact with Search Engines

One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO and search rankings is feeling empathy for your audience. Once you grasp how the average searcher, and more specifically, your target market, uses search, you can more effectively reach and keep those users.

Search engine usage has evolved over the years, but the primary principles of conducting a search remain largely unchanged. Below, I've listed the steps that comprise most search processes:

  1. Experience the need for an answer, solution, or piece of information
  2. Formulate that need in a string of words and phrases (the query)
  3. Execute the query at a search engine
  4. Browse through the results for a match
  5. Click on a result
  6. Scan for a solution, or a link to that solution
  7. If unsatisfied, return to the search results and browse for another link OR
  8. Perform a new search with refinements to the query

When this process results in the satisfactory completion of a task, a positive experience is created, both with the search engine and the site providing the information or result. Since the inception of web search, the activity  has grown to heights of great popularity, such that in December of 2005, the Pew Internet & American Life Project (PDF Study in Conjunction with ComScore) found that 90% of online men and 91% of online women used search engines. Of these, 42% of the men and 39% of the women reported using search engines every day and more than 85% of both groups say they "found the information they were looking for."

When looking at the broad picture of search engine usage, fascinating data is available from a multitude of sources. I've extracted those that are recent, relevant, and valuable, not only for understanding how users search, but in presenting a compelling argument about the power of search (which I suspect many readers of this guide may need to do for their managers):

  • An April 2006 study by iProspect & Jupiter Research (PDF) found that:
    • 62% of search engine users click on a search result within the first page of results, 90% within the first three pages. This is higher than in 2004, when 60% chose results on the first page, and much higher than 2002, when only 48% did.
    • 41% of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they seek report changing their search term and/or search engine if they do not find what they're looking for on the first page of results. 88% report doing so after three pages.
    • 36% of users agreed that "seeing a company listed among the top results on a search engine makes me think that the company is a top one within its field."
  • The November 2005 PEW Internet & ComScore Study (PDF) mentioned above revealed:
    • On an average day, 60 million people use search engines
    • Search engine usage rises with both education levels (27% of those without a high school diploma vs. 55% with a college or graduate degree) and income (29% of those earning less than $30,000 vs. 52% of those earning $75,000+)
  • An August 2007 Foresee/ACSI Report for eMarketer (Link) remarked:
    • 75% of search engine & portal users were satisfied with their experiences
    • In a breakdown by property, 79% of Yahoo! users, 78% of Google users, and 75% of both MSN & Ask.com users reported being satisfied
  • Comscore reported in August of 2007 (Link):
    • The number of search queries performed on the web grew 2% from 2006 to approximately 10 billion searches per month (across all engines)
    • Google owned the lion's share of searches with 55.2%, Yahoo! had 23.5%, Microsoft had 12.3%, and Ask.com had 4.7% (AOL, which shows Google results, clocked in at 4.4%)
  • A Yahoo! study from 2007 (Link, PDF) showed:
    • Online advertising drives in-store sales at a 6:1 ratio to online sales
    • Consumers in the study spent $16 offline (in stores) to every $1 spent online
  • Webvisible & Nielsen produced a 2007 report on local search (Link) that noted:
    • 74% of respondents used search engines to find local business information vs. 65% who turned to print yellow pages, 50% who used Internet yellow pages, and 44% who used traditional newspapers
    • 86% surveyed said they have used the Internet to find a local business, a rise from the 70% figure reported last year (2006)
    • 80% reported researching a product or service online, then making that purchase offline from a local business
  • A study on data leaked from AOL's search query logs (Link) reveals:
    • The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all click-through traffic
    • The second position receives 11.94%, the third 8.47%, the fourth 6.05%, and all others are under 5%
    • The first ten results received 89.71% of all click-through traffic, the next 10 results (normally listed on the second page of results) received 4.37%, the third page - 2.42%, and the fifth - 1.07%. All other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic clicks.

In addition to these statistics, research firm Enquiro conducted heatmap testing with search engine users (Link) that produced fascinating results about what users see and focus on when engaged in search activity. Below is a heatmap showing a test performed on Google. The graphic indicates that users spent the most amount of time where the colors are hottest - in the red, orange, and yellow sections of the page.

Google Eyetracking from Enquiro

This particular study perfectly illustrates how little attention is paid to results on the page vs. those higher up, and how users' eyes are drawn to bolded keywords, titles, and descriptions in the organic results vs. the paid search listings.

For those who are interested, a terrific collection of additional data from studies, surveys, and white papers can be found on SELand's Stats & Behaviors page.

All of this impressive research data leads us to some important conclusions about web search and marketing through search engines. In particular, we're able to make the following assumptions with relatively surety:

  1. Search is very, very popular. It reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world.
  2. Being listed in the first few results is critical to visibility.
  3. Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company/website.
  4. An incredible amount of offline economic activity is driven by searches on the web.

As marketers, the Internet as a whole and search, specifically, are undoubtedly one of the best and most important ways to reach consumers and build a business, no matter the size, reach, or focus.

 

 

I'm feeling a bit spent tonight, so despite the need for some refinement, and the fact that I should really put the search process into a visual flowchart, I'm hitting the deck. Tomorrow when I do this, I'll try to report some news as well :-)