Ion Leap Search Survey Results

How do you search?

If your website is at all important to your business, then you want it to intersect with consumers somehow. There are only a few ways to achieve this; search being the leading way by far. So the question of how consumers use search engines is critical. If your website’s content writing has key phrase strategies within it, then you’ve got a better chance of making that intersection. But knowing more specifics about how folks use search engines can affect how you refine your content, especially given how many times the Google algorithm is likely to change in 2010.

Primarily, this survey tells us how sophisticated your website readers are with search technology. And if you know that, then you know how to go about framing your content writing to better intersect with the way your customer prospects are searching. (Of course, you’d be far better off to hire Ion Leap to manage this for you in an ongoing way that keeps up with the algorithm)

The question – When performing a multi word search on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, how do you punctuate in or around the words?

Then we gave them a set of 4 choices. You could only choose one answer.

So what does it tell us?

First, let me clarify that this is the only survey I’ve ever seen that questions precisely how the public uses search engines. Second, I think there’s a large majority who don’t fully understand how search works. My brother-in-law didn’t know that companies could pay to show up on the right hand side and first 2 or 3 links at the top of a results page.

73% search with just the words

This group either doesn’t know that punctuating their search makes a difference, or they want the results to be delivered with less precision. I personally believe a large number of people don’t know that punctuating specific parts of a multi-word search can affect the results. That said, I certainly skip the quotes or other punctuation for many of my searches; usually when I’m in a hurry or just want a ton of results.

6% search with a “plus sign” between each word

My experience of this kind of a search is that it gives me precisely the same results I’d get with quote marks around the words. As the algorithm continues to change, this will likely be altered. Just in the last couple weeks I’ve noticed a great spread between results delivered with this search technique versus the quote marks.

12% search with quote marks around the words

The is a refreshingly high number and it represents a sophistication that I, as a content writer, find encouraging. This will help my clients achieve even higher rankings with the techniques we’re currently using. But it’s even more interesting than that. See the next one.

9% other

The question didn’t offer any options; it simply asked them to explain any other method of searching. The overwhelming number of those who clicked this option defined their response to mean they sometimes use quotes and sometimes don’t, depending on how they wanted the results delivered. So the “Other” response overwhelmingly indicated a higher level of sophistication. This answer totally surprised me, bringing the total who use more sophisticated searching closer to 20% of the total.

Conclusions

The way we write our content matters. As of now, the Google algorithm acknowledges the quotes around multi-word searches and delivers results accordingly. I believe this has major implications for the way your website content is written, but I won’t share more about that here as it’s proprietary. This much I will say – key phrase spamers are going to get spanked more than ever. High-value content writing will be rewarded more than ever.

If you’d like to chat about the specifics of how the data in this survey impacts your website, click the “contact” link above.