Certain trends in the behavior of web surfers conducting searches on the Internet confirm what SEOs have long suspected or considered “common knowledge.” Others just seem to make intuitive sense, while still others might be a little surprising. Keep reading to learn how you can take advantage of these various trends.
If old hippie slogans could be applied to search, most web surfers might groove to “Think Globally, Act Locally.” That could be used to characterize some of the findings of the Kelsey Research, as reported by Greg Sterling, former Senior Vice President and Program Director of Interactive Local Media at the Kelsey Group. He spoke about search at a recent Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. I’ll begin detailing those findings by showing you the general outlines of how search fits into the activity of the average Netizen.
According to Kelsey Research, search is now second only to email as the most important online activity. The gap between the two is fairly small and closing rapidly. About one third of those who shop online use only one search engine; a little more than half use two or three; while one out of ten say they use four or more search engines on a regular basis. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has seen figures for the percentages of searches handled worldwide by the major search engines.
The chances are, though, that these searchers are looking for something not very far from their own backyard. “Forty-three percent of search engine users are seeking a local merchant to buy something offline,” Sterling emphasized, “and 54 percent of search users have substituted Internet/search for the phone book, mostly for specific local lookups. Local is growing faster than general web search.” This is probably a much more literal way of letting your fingers do the walking than the Yellow Pages ever intended!
This implies that anyone who doesn’t take local search into consideration may be missing out on an important opportunity. This doesn’t mean that companies concerned with campaigns at the national level are going to lose out to Joe’s Hardware Store, of course (and I’ll cover branding a little later in this article). But it’s another example of how important it is to know how surfers use search engines.
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