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The number of online searches in the U.S. soared to nearly 5.1 billion searches in December from 3.3 billion a year earlier, despite just a slight uptick in the total number of Americans connecting to the Internet, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
But while this is great and to an extent surprising news (to me anyway) there are two sides to this coin. In a significant number of categories we're in, we've seen conversions decline over the past year. More newb's as a percent of total surfers could account for that.
Also, for those sites/webmasters who've seen their traffic stay static and thought they were doing OK treading water ... might wanna rethink that one. All other things being equal, your boat should have floated up with the tide. ;-)
I wonder. If a search on a kw phrase is, say, one "unit", does digging into page two count as two "units"? That would be a pathetic way to count.
What about changing the search phrase because the first one essentially failed.
Geez, if that is so, maybe I'll reconsider the posts of all those who hawk the POV that G's SERP's have gotten worse, intentionally, for the sake of, well, u know. Could it be?
Gotta have a deeper look at those numbers I guess.
I feel that as the number of users spend more time on the internet they will research more and conversions will decline for everyone.
Agree completely. Seems like people are becomgin more net savvy, realizing that there are sites out there other than Ebay and Amazon, that a tremendous amount of research can be conducted before buying something. Conversion rates probably will go down while search volume and site traffic continue to rise. Should bode well for AdSense and other contextual publishers.
We may be back to the 50% of ad dollars are wasted but I'm not sure which 50%.
Modest growth in users, huge growth in usage.
My suspicion is that Firefox has a huge role to play in this.
I'm noticing more users taking advantage of the inbuilt search facility for navigating.
I hardly ever type in www.webmasterworld.com any more, it's always webmasterworld, it performs an I'm feeling lucky search in Google.
The same for most sites [BBC technolgy news], [matt cutts blog], I just don't type URLs in any more. As a result, I use Google a lot more now than I ever did.
When a search for information about a broken foot yields serps about foot fetishes, then there is a problem. I won't go into details, just trust me...it's frustrating.
So much for overtaking Google huh? lol
Maybe because it's that much harder to find decent results - try, try, and try again ;-)
That's exactly what I was thinking. And I've also been pondering the actual benefit of all of Google's algo changes. Out of the dozens and dozens over the years, has it really made that much of a difference in how well you find what you are looking for?
Since Google went to (what appears to me)an authority website algorhythm with Any Words outranking "All Words" - I can't say it's any better in the results then it was 3 years ago. In fact, I think I find myself using the advanced search feature and vertical search engines more these days.
I kind of think that all those "Updates" were kind of pointless to a large degree. Are users really better off now then they were 3-4 years ago?
We have duplicated our visits in a year on a domain, but are still on the same ranking in Alexa.. so looks simply as there are 2 times more pages, OR/AND there are 2 times more overall pageviews than a year ago.. makes complete sense.
Maybe because it's that much harder to find decent results - try, try, and try again ;-)
I was being somewhat facetious, but not entirely. As a user, I find an increasing number of the sites that show in the serps to be blogs or MFA's. The blogs, I don't know - I don't get it. They're of no use to me. Some of the things are ridiculous to the point where they're mostly quoting and linking to other blogs. Yet they pollute the serps for many searches. The MFA's... well, Google, thanks for being the midwife to a whole lot of useless bytes floating around on the internet. By creating those twin monsters, Adwords and Adsense, you bunch have loaded the net with more spam than anyone else.
Maybe it's just the same users devoting more time to a greater variety of searches because they're spending more time on the net. Maybe it's because of people trying increasingly precise searches, in any one session, to get past the dross. The numbers don't tell you either way - it's not something to automatically see as a positive though.
