How the consumer is impacting search engine optimisation
Forget generic search terms, today’s consumer is more likely to get social recommendations and hone their target before they hit Google and brands need to take notice says David Bain in a piece that first appeared in Encore.
Nine years is a long time on the internet. In 2004, 11.5 per cent of the world’s population was online. By December 2012 that figure had increased to more than 34 per cent, or more than 2.4 billion people.
Yet despite this surge in internet usage, Google is reporting a significant drop in the popularity of many common search terms. According to Google Trends, there has been a 400 per cent decrease in popularity for the search term ‘hotels’ over the past nine years.
Nice article David. I think as people have become more comfortable with searching, & how a search engine works, their thought patterns & methodology for finding information has changed.
It’s like in the old days, when you were young & first used a library, you would go in & go to the librarian & ask for help finding a certain book, however as you learned to understand how books were sorted, you could become competent at finding your own books.. using long-tail search terms if you will.
Nice piece David, the thing is too many agency’s out their are still out dated with their methodology. I have met with many clients over the years where the prior agency has only told them to worry about 3 head keywords. They have clearly not research into what is converting for the business and or what is increasing or declining in search volume over time.
This is an interesting article.
I feel that search engines have an inherent problem. They are rather like throwing a dart at a dart board, you know where you want to land, so you aim carefully and throw, but in the case of the search engine dart board, the face is constantly changing, so by the time the arrow reaches its target, the space may have altered.
I am finding that specific details are becoming less and less effective where search engines are concerned. They seem to broaden the range and give me alternatives I do not require. There are also many blind alleys these days, confusing specific requests with general Blog opinions etc.
Then again, perhaps they are getting smarter as I get older.