SES London: Searcher Behaviour Research Update

Speakers: Chris Sherman (Executive editor at searchenginewatch.com), Graham Hansell (Head of Search Strategy at Sitelynx), Bob Ivins (Managing Director at conScore Europe), Jonty Kelt (Managing Director UK&Europe of Performics, a DoubleClick division), Elisabeth van Couvering (didn’t catch the company name and not sure if I spelled the name right).

Elisabeth starts by outlining areas of activity for internet users:
1. Home Zone: web sites you visit every day, such as news sites, community sites, search and institutional sites. This would typically be 5 or 6 web sites
2. Neighbourhood zone: web sites that people know how to get to, the known part of the web as it were. This would typically be about 75 web sites. The number of web sites in the neighbourhood zone gets bigger as users get more experienced.
3. The unknown zones: everything else on the web.

Sessions are routine-like in the home zone (51%), 36% of sessions are in the neighbourhood zone and 11% are voyages of discovery (aka the unknown zone).

Search is a critical aspect in this context. Search engines account for one third of sessions in the neighbourhood zone, to find something you knew was there already. Even greater in the unknown zone: search engines are used as a gateway to things you don’t know but think might be on the web, a kind of discovery path as it were.

Bob Ivins speaks of ‘More Searchers Searching More’. There are currently 700 million people online (this number may be understated), aged 15 and over. The majority of internet traffic is coming from outside the USA. The US internet community is growing at 5% a year, while the non-US internet community is growing 3 times faster. The average person searches 55 times per month, accounting for about 1.1 billion searches per day worldwide.

The reach on the internet is 71.8% mail and 87.2% search. The average number of search results pages (SERPs) is declining over time which stresses once again the need to be on the first page. Europeans are more likely to use search than Americans. The reach of search is 86% in the USA against 95% in Germany.

USA market share
Google 43%
Yahoo 28%
MSN 11%
Ask 6%

The European market shows for almighty Google:
Germany 89% of market share
France 81% of market share
UK 66% of market share
Striking is that while Google accounts for 76% of international business, only 42% of its revenues are international.

Recommendations: SEOs need to focus on relevancy, creativity and being on the first page.

Jonty Kelt continues to say that there is an increase in broadband internet access, an increase in women online (hurray!), an increase in search and an increase in purchasing behaviour.

The search channels are widening, searchers are becoming more sophisticated. If they don’t find what they are looking for immediately they either change search engine or change search query, 88% of searchers do this; searchers are becoming more determined. 8.9% add words to their query (interesting detail: these long keyword phrases account for 90% of transactions online).
Moreover: 36% of searchers believe that top results on the SERPs are leaders in their field.

When questioned about the reasons why certain results are clicked and others not, searchers name as reasons for click-through:
43% position on first page
32% description snippet
17% top result on page

Q&A’s of this section:

What are searchers doing before they convert?
Over half of buyers made the first search over 2 weeks prior to the purchase, using generic keywords. Several combinations of winding paths, long paths, long & winding paths, awareness and investigation.

Number of searchers goes up
Number of search queries per searcher goes up
Number of SERPs visited goes down
30% more search queries last year

Search engine literacy:
Less literate users are tending to use less complex phrases, they don’t know how to differentiate between paid and non-paid results. Novice searchers are less aware that the content of the web is not quality controlled.

Click-through stats:
23 % paid results
77 % natural search results

Chris Sherman comments that while 77% of click-through is for organic search (against 23% paid results), almost all of online marketing budgets go to paid search, which is indeed a bit of a weird situation. He also points out that 79% of Google users say they prefer organic listings while 79% of MSN users prefer paid listings.

Technorati tags: ses - search engine strategies - search