Forum Moderators: phranque
Six in 10 of those surveyed typed in just one word in order to find what they were looking for - a big ask, when market leader Google, for instance, indexes 4,285,199,774 documents.Add in those who use two words, and that's four-fifths of searchers. Only 3% tie words together with quote marks, and 1% use other advanced search techniques to get better results.
From [news.bbc.co.uk...]
How much traffic am I missing by not ranking for any one word phrases?
And when results are returned, few people look beyond the initial links provided. "If it is beyond the first page, it is as if it did not exist," Dr Nielsen says.
I think we all knew this ;)
Can anyone find the source of this?
Sad, I guess I'll have to be competing more on 1 word phrases :(
Most of my site gets its traffic from 2+ word searches but it's very informative to know that there's still soooo many people out there who will never find my site due to single word searches.
This is how I interpret the report - without the actual source - probably one of those $12000 things the Nielsen throws together.
n number of people tested - perform a use case (a use case is - find a site that sells the Blue Widget 10000 and buy it)
6/10 - 1 word search "widget"
uh oh cant find it.
4/5 - ahha try again - "blue widget" or "widget 10000" (quotes are mine)
3/100 - I'll use some quotes!
1/100 - OK I'll use some advanced options
I think the report will basically show us that 5/10 users are just basically lazy and will type in one word, see the 1st page of results and only then - refine the search. Anyone else get the same reading?
I think almost everyone at some point in time uses one word to search, but that doesn't mean they do so all the time.
This is how I interpret the report
Your reading is attractive. Certainly sounds like the way people ought to respond when a search strategy doesn't work.
But frankly, after re-reading the way the results are presented in this article, it seems extremely unlikely. The study appears to already take this into account, in which case the "6 in 10" would be those who only used single word searches to try to accomplish the task.
Yet I'm not sure how useful these general statistics are for determining SEO strategy for any particular site.
For one thing, we're told that 1/3 of the folks were unable to complete the assignment. If they are mostly from the 6 in 10 (which I suspect, though it would be nice if they told us!) more than HALF of the single-word only searchers can't successfully carry out the task anyway! They were not able to find relevant sites. That suggests it is a matter of people making very poor word choices, NOT highly competitive ones. Or perhaps they chose words that are highly competitive but very general and difficult to focus.
In any case, what sort of SEO strategy do you devise to overcome this sort of inability?
Going back to the numbers. If I am correct in my assumption that the failures were all or nearly all from the single-word (only) searchers, it is possible that out of 100 searchers:
33 single-word searchers failed
27 single-word searchers succeeded
40 others succeed by using more complex searches
In other words, many more of the successful searchers used multiple words. (Again, it would help to have this broken out in more detail.) If the greater number of those who are able to perform the task come from this group of slightly more savvy searchers, perhaps they are the main ones we should be targeting anyway?
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I also see some significant weaknesses in this particular study --at least in how it is presented -- that make it less useful for our purposes:
1) As presented it doesn't actually demonstrate what the overall search strategy would be of those who were successful at this assignment using only single-word searches. Is this what they do as a rule? Or do some/many/most of them move on to multi-word or "advanced" searches when their first efforts come up short? (Seems to me, you can't say what they won't do until they fail!)
2) The study does not (it seems) begin with people who are motivated to perform a task/find something they expect to use. Rather, they are handed the task for the sake of the experiment. This may be useful to find out something about capabilities of web-users in the general public. But it may well skew the picture of how the people motivated to look for what you are providing will go about finding it.
3) Related to the preceding -- this generic task may not be comparable that of people finding a particular niche site and how people with that particular interest might go about searching for it. This is where we need to know our audience. It matters much more to me whether my target audience includes a lot of single-word searchers, or (I hope!) more who are a bit more sophisticated in the words and expressions they choose. My goal is to enable those who are interested in what I am 'selling' to find my site.
(Whatever the study does or doesn't show, it reminds me of something I believed before the internet took off. We need to do a much better job in educating people on how to search and do research. Because it's not so much what you know as knowing how to find answers for what you don't know.)
we're told that 1/3 of the folks were unable to complete the assignment.
Good point - I think that your reading of the (limited) information is probably more correct than mine.
I agree with the limitations as well - though from the Nielsen reports I've actually read they usually take account of many of these. Motivation - I think this would be a big factor... how long were they given before failure was assumed?
Whatever the study does or doesn't show, it reminds me of something I believed before the internet took off. We need to do a much better job in educating people on how to search and do research. Because it's not so much what you know as knowing how to find answers for what you don't know.
I agree with you wholeheartedly there. Got a job after not knowing an answer in an interview - told them where I'd look instead. Now I work for myself, it really pays off, I have no one to ask now - except here ;)
Let's take a look at last months searches containing the word "shoe"
Hmm.. The single word word "Shoe" was searched for 855,013 times. Wow, that's alot. Who looks for just the word shoe. Must be the 6 in 10 searching by one word.
Now, let's look at how many searches were done searches for 2+ words containing the word "shoe". 2,081,202 and OV search suggestion tool stops at searches less than 7500 (for this term) so there are probably say 100,000 more that could be added.
So do all searchers always search by one word and the other 4 in 6 just spend their entire day doing nothing but searching searching or do people start out with one word and move on to 2 when they fail.
About five minutes ago I did a search for a company. It is located on the other side of the US from me; I needed to know the main switchboard phone number.
I typed in the name of the company (not a common word) and the company's main web site was on the first page of hits. Does this make me part of the 60%?
do all searchers always search by one word and the other 4 in 6 just spend their entire day doing nothing but searching
Well, I do think there are weaknesses in the study. But I'm not sure your numbers demonstrate this.
Let's assume the specific example you've chosen is typical. In your scenario we would have:
60% do about 855,000 single-word searches
40% do about 2,200,000 multi-word searches
If I've got my math straight, that would mean each of the multi-word searchers would be doing 3.9 searches for each search done by the single-word only searchers.
If we instead assume that everyone starts by searching for the single word "shoe", and 40% continue with multi-word searches, the latter would end up doing something like 7.4 searches for every one by the single-word only crowd.
Most likely, the number would fall somewhere in between, say, 5 to 6 searches.
I'm not arguing that the 60% is correct across-the-board, but the proportions this yields are not too incredible. And it certainly is not difficult to see how multi-word searchers might try several more things than those who stick with just a single word.
How much time do you guys spend on search engines everyday? Really, I mean it. How long does it take any of us to track down a thing on a search engine? If it is taking 3-4 searches for us, what does it say aboutthe search engines' results?
