Many marketers take for granted the search transaction. Many believe it’s simply a matter of a user typing in a search, the search engine spitting out results, and the searcher reviewing them and ultimately deciding on the best one. But this doesn’t take into account the subtle nuances of human behavior. Human beings are irrational, unpredictable and multifaceted beings with different beliefs, backgrounds, and values.
Proficient search engine marketing requires a further examination of searcher behavior. In this post, we will cover a few of the factors that affect searcher behavior.
1. Domain expertise
Domain expertise refers to a searcher’s familiarity with the subject their searching. When seeking specific information, a layman will be less certain how to begin, use less precise language, and have more trouble evaluating the results. Compare this to a subject matter expert who would know the exact verbiage to produce the desired results.
2. Search experience
This relates to a user’s search capabilities and knowledge. Knowing how to use Boolean operators, exact strings, and filtering controls gives you a much bigger tool set to help you search effectively. This factor seems to be secondary to domain expertise, however. Many people with little search experience but a lot of domain knowledge can do better than a technophile searching within an unfamiliar subject.
3. Cognitive Style
This can be thought of as a spectrum between Global thinking and Analytical thinking. Global thinkers will initially seek a breadth of knowledge across related topics, while analytical thinkers will dive into a single topic to find highly specific information. Now keep in mind, this is a spectrum, and these are just extremes. Most searchers will fall somewhere between these two.
4. Goal Type
Goal types can be broadly lumped into three categories:
· Navigational: are efforts to reach a particular web location, for instance an employer’s timesheet.
· Informational: seeking out documents or information related to a specific topic.
· Transactional: are meant to accomplish something online, such as paying a bill.
5. Mode of seeking
Essentially the mode of seeking boils down to someone’s understanding of what they are trying to find. This level of understanding can range from knowing exactly what the user needs and where to find it, to exploratory searching, where they are only loosely able to describe what they seek.
6. Situational idiosyncrasies
Finally, the user is affected by situational idiosyncrasies that are mostly impossible to record. These can include mood, atmosphere, stress level, and any number of other factors.
While many of these factors are difficult or impossible to record, they should help you think about your user’s and the experience they have when searching online. You can shape these factors into different personas to help you better target your web design and search campaigns to better serve the spectrum of your searcher market.
Posts Tagged ‘Cleveland Search Engine Optimization’
Lessons In Search Engine Marketing: Factors Affecting Searcher Behavior
Friday, January 27th, 2012How Cuil’s Online Marketing Agency Slipped
Monday, September 1st, 2008It’s not everyday that a new, high-profile search engine rolls out. And it’s even rarer that a new search engine can boast that it has been engineered by former Google employees. That’s why Cuil (pronounced cool—it’s an Irish-Gaelic word for “knowledge”) has garnered so much attention.
When launched in late July, its online marketing agency hyped Cuil as perhaps the last best hope to compete with the mighty Google. And it may not have been a coincidence that Google, no doubt privy to Cuil’s scheduled debut, and possibly attempting to take the wind out of the feisty new search engine’s sails, had announced a few days earlier that it had indexed a trillion Web pages.
So how can Cuil compete with that? As of now, it can’t; at least not yet. Within hours of Cuil’s release, the search engine became a proving ground for search engine experts and enthusiasts who were eager to test the great claims of Cuil’s online marketing agency. And the resulting opinions were mixed.
It looks like Cuil does have some brains behind it, but it has an even better online marketing agency. The media hype that ran in concert with Cuil’s debut seems to have been the result of an excellent marketing campaign that was crafted by experts. They knew that the tech media, who are always looking for the next big thing, may have grown a bit tired of writing about Google’s apparent indestructibility. Cuil’s online marketing agency also knew that the media is always looking for a new angle on old stories. So when Cuil’s marketers presented to the press the opportunity to cover a search engine that maybe—just maybe—could create some cracks in Google’s dominance, the press hopped happily on board.
But with those bold declarations by Cuil’s online marketing agency came close scrutiny by search engine experts. And the verdict is that Cuil isn’t yet able to rank with the big guys in the search engine world. Simple searches returned pages and images that were completely unrelated.
There’s a lesson here, and it has to do with marketing. Cuil’s online marketing agency campaign was brilliant in that it earned the fledging search engine huge amounts of coverage. However, the search engine wasn’t at the level where it could back up its online marketing agency’s claims. With advanced engines like Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo!, users have grown used to search results that are extremely accurate. And Cuil isn’t there yet.
For Cuil, a wiser path may have been a quieter debut while at the same time going through constant refining and revision. The opportunity to improve its listings without the amount of close scrutiny it has revived within days of its debut would have resulted in a stronger search engine and fewer disappointed users. There’s still a chance that Cuil will develop into a premiere search engine. But Cuil now faces the added difficulty of overcoming its online marketing agency’s initial vast, and ultimately inflated, promises.
Microsoft’s New Plans for Search Engine Marketing
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008Lately we’ve heard a lot in search engine marketing about Yahoo!, the second most popular search engine on the Internet, making recent and innovative strides in an attempt to boost its user base. With additional search engine marketing content launches like Fire Eagle, which seeks to give Yahoo! a boost in the local search market, and Yahoo! Buzz, which sees the company taking a stab at user-generated content, Yahoo! shows no sign of slowing down. Even as internal strife makes the company’s future direction uncertain.
But what has Microsoft, whose MSN search engine has fallen further behind Yahoo!, in the past year, been up to? Well in search engine marketing, not much. Until now, that is. Recently, Microsoft announced its latest search engine marketing project. The software company said that it intends to unroll an updated MSN search engine that provides much better tailored individual search results. This search engine marketing announcement comes just after Microsoft announced that they have acquired the burgeoning search engine company Powerset.
And that’s not a coincidence. Powerset is a new search engine that strives to apply “language processing” to searches. That means it’s a search engine built to better understand human language better than Google or Yahoo! currently can. According to the Powerset team’s search engine marketing materials, their engine can read Web pages more like a human reads Web pages, so it can return more relevant results. This means a user can be more expressive in their search queries. They can ask questions or give the search engine commands in plain English (or Spanish, or Italian, or Bahasa Indonesian). Of course a search engine marketing strategy of teaching computers, machines that are purely logical, to understand humans is a notoriously hard job. Humans often think and communicate in metaphors and abstracts, and those can be difficult for computers to understand. And humans have a hard enough time communicating with each other, after all. But the Powerset team believes that their search engine marketing strategy is on to something, and so does Microsoft.
This new development in search engine marketing looks promising, but MSN has a long way to go before it’s once again considered a serious contender with Yahoo! and Google. Right now, MSN only registers 10% of U.S. search queries; MSN can’t just rely on innovative technology to regain market share. It has to win a public relations battle and bring new users into the fold.
