User Behavior Confirms Marketing Truths - Confidence and Loyalty
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Another interesting attitude of searchers toward search engines is illuminated by what they do when they don’t find what they’re looking for. Only two percent of them give up. As for the rest, 41 percent who continue their search will change their search term and/or search engine if they don’t find what they’re looking for on the first page of results. More than twice as many (88 percent) will do so if they don’t find it in the first three pages.
Most of these unsatisfied searchers (82 percent) will continue their search using the same search engine that wasn’t helpful enough initially, but they will add more keywords to refine the search. This seems to indicate a certain amount of search engine loyalty. Indeed, when the same question was asked in 2002 (“When you perform a search on a search engine and don’t find what you are looking for, what are you typically more likely to do?”), less than 70 percent of searchers stuck with the same search engine – more than a quarter, in fact, switched search engines and entered the same keywords they’d used in their initial search.
iProspect offers an interesting interpretation of this study result. “This finding seems to indicate that a fairly high level of confidence exists on the part of users across search engines in general, as the vast majority seems to trust their search engine of choice to return the correct information more than they trust themselves to enter the appropriate keywords.” In short, search engine loyalty is real. Again, this is something that SEOs and SEMs have known for some time, but here are the figures to prove it.
So what does this mean specifically for SEOs and SEMs as far as their marketing campaigns? Well, since web surfers are using longer keywords when they can’t find what they’re looking for, marketers and SEOs should try to do a better job of targeting these keywords. With Google, you can use their “broad match” functionality within their paid search campaigns, and balance this with the strategic use of “negative matching” or “exclusions.” You can do something similar with Yahoo’s search ad marketing. Incidentally, the longer, very specific keywords that don’t individually yield a lot of traffic, but significant numbers of both traffic and conversions collectively, is what is meant by “the long tail of search.”
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