“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.”
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.”
Search engine usage has evolved over the years but the primary principles of conducting a search remain largely unchanged. Listed here is the steps that comprise most search processes:
- Experience the need for an answer, solution or piece of information.
- Formulate that need in a string of words and phrases, also known as “the query.”
- Execute the query at a search engine.
- Browse through the results for a match.
- Click on a result.
- Scan for a solution, or a link to that solution.
- If unsatisfied, return to the search results and browse for another link or…
- Perform a new search with refinements to the query.
- Search is very, very popular. It reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world.
- Being listed in the first few results is critical to visibility.
- 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.
- An incredible amount of offline economic activity is driven by searches on the web
