How People Interact With SEO?"

One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is empathy for your audience. Once you grasp what the average searcher, and more specifically, your target market, is looking for, you can more effectively reach and keep those users.

We like to say "Build for users, not search engines." When users have a bad experience at your site, when they can't accomplish a task or find what they were looking for, this often correlates with poor search engine performance. On the other hand, when users are happy with your website, a positive experience is created, both with the search engine and the site providing the information or result.
What are users looking for? There are three types of search queries users generally perform:

• "Do" Transactional Queries - Action queries such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.
• "Know" Informational Queries - When a user seeks information, such as the name of the band or the best restaurant in New York City.
• "Go" Navigation Queries - Search queries that seek a particular online destination, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL.

When visitors type a query into a search box and land on your site, will they be satisfied with what they find? This is the primary question search engines try to figure out millions of times per day. The search engines' primary responsibility is to serve relevant results to their users.
It all starts with the words typed into a small box.

 

	Search engine usage has evolved over the years but the primary principles of conducting a search remain largely unchanged. Listed here are the steps that comprise most search processes:

	Experience the need for an answer, solution or piece of information.

	Formulate that need in a string of words and phrases, also known as “the query.”

	Enter the query into a search engine.

	Browse through the results for a match.

	Click on a result.

	Scan for a solution, or a link to that solution.

	If unsatisfied, return to the search results and browse for another link or...

	Perform a new search with refinements to the query.

 

Why invest time, effort and resources on SEO? When looking at the broad picture of search engine usage, fascinating data is available from several studies. We've extracted those that are recent, relevant, and valuable, not only for understanding how users search, but to help present a compelling argument about the power of search.

Google leads the way in an October 2011 study by comScore:

• Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in April with 65.4 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 17.2 percent, and Microsoft Sites with 13.4 percent. (Microsoft powers Yahoo Search. In the real world, most webmasters see a much higher percentage of their traffic from Google than these numbers suggest.)
• Americans alone conducted a staggering 20.3 billion searches in one month. Google Sites accounted for 13.4 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (3.3 billion), Microsoft Sites (2.7 billion), Ask Network (518 million) and AOL LLC (277 million).
• Total search powered by Google properties equaled 67.7 percent of all search queries, followed by Bing which powered 26.7 percent of all search. (Microsoft powers Yahoo Search. In the real world, most webmasters see a much higher percentage of their traffic from Google than these numbers suggest.) view

Billions spent on online marketing from an August 2011 Forrester report:

• Interactive marketing will near $77 billion in 2016.
• This spend will represent 26% of all advertising budgets combined.
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Search is the new Yellow Pages from a Burke 2011 report:

• 76% of respondents used search engines to find local business information vs. 74% who turned to print yellow pages.
• 57% who used Internet yellow pages, and 44% who used traditional newspapers.
• 67% had used search engines in the past 30 days to find local information, and 23% responded that they had used online social networks as a local media source.
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An August 2011 PEW Internet Study revealed:

• The percentage of Internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of 59% of all adult Internet users.
• With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 61 percent of Internet users who use e-mail, arguably the Internet's all-time killer app, on a typical day.
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StatCounter Global Stats Reports the top 5 Search Engines Sending Traffic Worldwide:

• Google sends 90.62% of traffic.
• Yahoo! sends 3.78% of traffic.
• Bing sends 3.72% of traffic.
• Ask Jeeves sends .36% of traffic.
• Baidu sends .35% of traffic.
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A 2011 Study by Slingshot SEO Reveals Click-through Rates for Top Rankings:

• A #1 position in Google's search results receives 18.2% of all click-through traffic.
• The second position receives 10.1%, the third 7.2%, the fourth 4.8%, and all others are under 2%.
• A #1 position in Bing's search results averages a 9.66% click-through rate.
• The total average CTR for first ten results was 52.32% for Google and 26.32% for Bing.
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All of this impressive research data leads us to important conclusions about web search and marketing through search engines. In particular, we’re able to make the following statements:

• Search is very, very popular. Growing strong at nearly 20% a year, it reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world.
• Search drives an incredible amount of both online and offline economic activity.
• Higher rankings in the first few results are critical to visibility.
• Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company/website.

Learning the foundations of SEO is a vital step in achieving these goals.