Search engine marketers and usability engineers want to understand why we go to websites and what we do after we arrive at a search results page. They ask questions like:
- Are we satisfied with where we landed?
- Did the engine provide accurate results listings?
- Was our click choice a positive one?
- Did we stay on the site or leave?
- If we left, what search result better matched what we wanted to find?
- Was it the search results or did we have a bad experience with the web page we landed on?
Both search engines and human factors related fields study our intent.
Author Matt Bailey points to the depth of the importance of intent in his new book, Internet Marketing: An Hour a Day.
“Search engines are integrating more multimedia and allowing deeper access to documents and media earlier in the search process. They are attempting to determine the intent of the searcher and deliver results accordingly.”
What is our intent? Why do we visit the Internet? Why do we use search sites such as Google and Youtube?
In a 2009 ComScore study (comScore, 2009), they found that “Nearly one out of every ten minutes a person spends online around the world is spent on a Google site.” This includes the search engine itself, Youtube, which they own, Google books, email, Google reader and more.
Clearly, marketers want to be sure their clients’ websites perform well in Google’s web properties. Not doing so can wreck the success of a business.
Search Behavior = People Who Search
Shortly after search engines and information sites appeared on the Internet, case studies zeroed in to understand why, who, where, when, where and how humans use them. Hot on the trail, too, were analysts interested in learning about site traffic, popularity, rank and how to make money from it.
Many of you were guinea pigs during the 1990’s when web page backgrounds were gray with black text, and animation, 3D images, scrolling text boxes, rotating banners and blinking images were all part of a typical user interface.
As fun as all those things were to create (I loved animating images), web designers had to buckle to user preferences.
Search engines learned what we really come to the Internet for. Perhaps search engine sites are not suitable for certain subject types when it comes to information searches. In order to improve search engine design and SEO marketing efforts, we try to understand user intent and goals for searching.
It’s been well established at this point that search engines are used by us to find information. What kinds of information are most popular?
A recent study from Australia on who uses search engines found that half of search engine queries were looking for a particular website, while the other 50% were split between ecommerce and popular culture searches.
The study also pointed to what is referred to as “leisure searches”. The findings present the idea of search sites not only for information gathering or shortcuts to web sites, but they’re also sources for leisure, with one in six of all searches estimated as being leisure searches.
The Australian study offered some surprising details for anyone wondering what we’re searching for, by subject. Adult site searches fell into the middle, with ecommerce being second, edged under a tad by popular culture topics. Health, weather, contemporary affairs and government are the least popular searches.
The study stood out from others because it included and factored in the lifestyle of their participants. This is different than user testing labs or Eye tracking tests. To their surprise, lifestyle choices had no measurable impact on the type of search queries. In fact, new questions were raised on user –searcher behavior.
For example, do Internet users tend to go to particular trusted web sites for information on healthcare, computing and contemporary affairs, rather than use search engines? Does the distribution of the most ranked subjects searched for represent user interests or the suitability of search engines for looking up certain types of topics?
Another study (Broder, 2002) narrows search engine user behavior as informational, navigational, transactional and leisure. Half the searches in the study were navigational and one-third, transactional. Half of all searchers know where they want to go.
What Does This Mean To Search Marketers?
The most obvious is that it’s time to accept usability studies into marketing strategy. And, user experience professionals can no longer devalue the role of search marketers. Both camps provide essential skills and expertise needed for web site projects.
A lot of what’s happening on the Internet is relationship building. The global community wants this so badly they invented social networking sites and social marketing to drive interest and generate revenue from these new site sources.
Emotional web design is no accident. We’re emotional beings. Empathy makes us connect with others.
“In life and business, focus on creating win-win situations. Look beyond the immediate sale in order to connect with customers as people.” – Steve Harper, The Ripple Effect.
Despite our developing mental models and creating user personas, we remain on the edge of understanding who uses our stuff. Wouldn’t it be grand if stakeholders got out of their offices and actually interacted with the people who use their websites?
I’ve often wished I could video people who multi-task at home, with one hand on a laundry basket, an ear to the cell phone and a hand reaching for the laptop nearby. What does that busy person search for and how? Can we make their experience less stressful?
Division between marketing and user experience will dissolve as both approaches discover they need each others’ data to do a better job for their clients.
There’s no question that a passion for usability and search engine marketing leads to their fascinating cousins, like information architecture, findability, captology, analytics and neurology. There’s also no question that money can be made by optimizing for and advertising in search engines.
Studying user behavior is a win-win for search engine technology, search marketing and website usability and human factors.
Cited Resources:
Broder 2002; A Taxonomy of Web Search (PDF)
Waller, Vivienne 2010; Not Just Information: Who Searches for What on the Search Engine Google?
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Just Behave
The following is part of a multiple part series covering image optimization techniques. This article is intended for beginners through intermediate SEO’s; if this doesn’t pertain to you, you may want to skim as most of this will probably be review material for you.
Some of the big questions many people ask are why would they even want to perform image optimization? Doesn’t it just help people who want to steal or hotlink images? And is there really any meaningful traffic or links that you can get from image optimization? IMHO the answer is yes. Let’s say someone is going on a trip to Italy. They might do image searches for things to do or see in Italy and for famous Italian landmarks like the Leaning Tower of Piza, the Trevi Fountain, or St. Peter’s Basilica. Thanks to Google’s universal search results, images provide a way to get onto the first page (or, in some cases, the top result) and get a click through, an ad view, or adsense impression. It might even get a lead generation completion. Maybe you run a fish store. If a university professor or government agency needs a picture of a fish and your image result appears, and you allow your images to be reused in exchange for a link, this can be huge way to passively build links slowly over time (true story! It happened for a client I used to have). Now that we’ve got the why out of the way, let’s talk about the “how” of image optimization.
Filenames
This is one of the most basic elements of image optimization. If you have an image of blue widgets, I would name your image “blue-widgets.jpg” or “blue-widgets.gif”. You can use other formats like PNG, but I have gotten better results with “jpg” and “gif” files. You can use other characters like underscore as word delimiters, but I get better results with hyphens. You can run the words together if they are separate in other factors. I have found stemming plays a role (ie widget vs widgets), but you can get around it using other factors. I haven’t seen capitalization play a role, but I prefer to use all lower case because I usually use Apache servers and case sensitivity matters. If you are going to have multiple images of the same object-type, I suggest adding a “-1″, “-2″ onto the end.
Now, before the hate mail or hate tweets start, it is entirely possible to have an image rank without the keywords being in the file name–IF there are enough other factors in place. However, you should ask yourself why would you give up a chance to give a search engine a signal about what an image is about? If you work on a large ecommerce platform or other large database application, chances are good that your gold diamond earrings will have an image file name like “GDX347294.jpg” that corresponds to the item’s SKU or other internal classifier. So, yes, you will have to sacrifice the keyword for business reasons.
ALT Text
Let’s get the basic information out of the way: ALT text was designed for screen readers or visually-impaired people to know what they weren’t seeing. Your goal is to use it to satisfy the screen readers while being keyword focused enough for the search engines and without being a keyword stuffing spammer. Here’s an example of ALT text variations:
Keyword stuffed: discount hotel room paris france
ALT text only: Eiffel Tower
SEO optimized: Eiffel Tower from Louvre Bons Enfants hotel room
Striving to find a balance between pleasing the search engines and text readers can be a juggling act. If you are risky with some of your other SEO techniques, I’d play this on the safe side.
Headings and Bold Text
If image optimization for a particular image is important, I really like to optimize the image with bold or a heading tag of the term I’m chasing right above the image. I’ve found this really helps give a strong signal to the engines
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