Understanding the UK search user
HarvestDigital, an online marketing agency in the UK that boasts of some impressive accounts, recently commissioned Metro Research to understand the behaviour of experienced search users. Though the sample size was fairly small (a little over 200 participants), the fact that the survey participants were regular and experienced users makes the study useful for search users engine marketers targeting the UK search engine users (I’d wager that the behaviour may not be entirely different amongst users elsewhere).
The key takeaways from the study results that I see are:
Most users used more than one search engine. So, what’s great about that, one may ask. We all know how dominant Google is and that’s probably the first engine that the searcher thinks of; so why are searchers still having to go to another engine? Lack of relevance/ unsatisfactory results? Cross checking? Checking out another sample? This brings another pertinent question: why aren’t meta search engines more popular than they are currently?
Nevertheless, considering the above, it is in the marketer’s interest to ensure that they are getting ranked high on the other engines as well. The traffic that these search engines generate, which much lower in absolute terms, is certainly not insignificant to be ignored.
When one talks of the major engines, we limit the discussion to Google, Yahoo & MSN. But this study pointed out that Ask (formerly AskJeeves.com) had a higher proportion of users than MSN. The obvious implication- don’t ignore this engine.
All studies into search user behaviour so far seem to indicate that the two reasons why a user clicks into a particular search result (pure common sense, if you think about it!) are that:
- the site is ranked high on the search results page and so users presume the result to be relevant to their needs (there’s an implicit vote of confidence to the search engine)
- the description that shows up in the search results seems relevant.
Search engine marketers have partial control of both these aspects at their end, though the attempt to gain total control (a losing battle?) fuels the multi-billion dollar search engine optimization industry.
What we are learning by the day, I think, is that we are best served in focusing on controlling those aspects that we as search engine marketers can at our end. The rest may just be a futile misadventure.
