The Little Kid on the Ukulele Drove Me to SEARCH; What Drives Your Customers to Search for You?

Google says people search for three things:
Entertainment, Enlightenment and Seeking Solutions.

The Web offers us the opportunity to carve out a target market and develop a niche. Sales 101 teaches us to find out where our prospect is hurting and solve their pain.

So combining the above...people have problems or goals and use the Web to search for related information.

Thus your task is to figure out how your product or service fulfills their quest, answer their questions (as an expert), befriend them (people buy from people they like), and gradually they will become customers.

The magic key is figuring out what keywords they would enter in a search engine to find what you offer. They of course, cannot know you name, WEB address, or any other personal information. Sort of you Googling Little+Kid+Singing+Jason+Mraz!

It is quite possible that customers do not really search for information, rather they are browsing content and then inadvertently applying an iterative process with the help of intelligent search engines. How information is presently gathered and reported from the ground has been skewed by personal preferences and interests in several fields including Publishing. I suggest reviewing one of Google's patent applications that depicts / including an apparatus for predicative query for advertisements.

Most searchers in fact are searching no more than single word characters and not complex strings. One report I found stated more than 90% of all searches are conducted by no more than 3 or 4 words.

While there are a few things that search engines can tell us on user preferences and even unique inquiry dependent upon the platform which is being utilized, it is through reports from the likes of CommScore which press the issue even further by denoting search is on a decline despite access to content.

A great question to follow up on "What drives your customers to search for you?" could be; "How can you be found with strong relevancy through three or four words and differentiate yourself from your competition without an advertising management system overlapping query logs?"

Michael -- I agree with everything you say, but I also believe that some companies assume search is the only thing they need to do. I, on the other hand, believe that search can be 'activated.' I didn't have a need to find the ukulele kid before I heard the radio announcer. What drove me was curiosity but that wouldn't have happened arbitrarily without drive time radio. My point is that companies need to think about how they're investing their valuable marketing dollars. If they don't balance that correctly and if they sacrifice other marketing tactics (PR, advertising, direct/e-mail, etc.) for big investments in pay-per-click, they may be doing themselves a dis-service.

Brent -- thanks for the thoughts. I think Michael's point about what drives search is still relevant. I don't think people just go browse content for no reason, even though the process may be as you describe. On the other hand, I agree that most people still do single word searches, but I think that's part of the adoption rate + a learning curve. I've been using search for years, so I know that I can use long tail keywords (i.e., lots of words in my search) to refine my results. A lot of newbie users still don't know to do that, but everyone who's ever watched me search learns that practice quickly! So, I'd bet that over time people will adapt -- if for no reason other than there is so much content out there that it will save them immense time to do so.

Also, I'd love to see the ComScore report that says search is on the decline. I have seen reports saying the SEM (ie, pay per click) is on the decline but that organic search is climbing. I've also seen reports that show shifts to Bing and declines in Yahoo and Google (but not much). But I haven't seen any report saying search overall is dropping. Please share...

Thanks...

True indeed, as time spent on sites:total internet users increases the adoption rate should scale up. That being said, I have had the pleasure of working with Scientists, Doctors and Engineers who could consistently find information others could not by adopting a boolean true false search logic including left and right truncation and proximity searching. Even an advanced look up on Google is typically beyond most individuals search capacity, not withstanding results appear to be ad based influenced exceptions being Google Scholar, WolframAlpha, and paid databases like Dialog and Lex/Nex.

To me, all this means iterations could be flawed slightly when searching. So there could be a counter-intuitive aspect working against us Carol. In essence a watery ai that performs research-like search functions across a slightly biased platform barely clears the bar that most information analysts consider as search.

I do agree with you Carol that those of us who have been adopting search criterion for years can influence to some extent user behavior through training, illustration on proximity search or developing macros which create custom search engines for browsing content. The best search results are typically produced through human filters who co-develop strategy and then correlate results with a peer2peer verification process. Once intimately familiar with such a stringent process to find data, one can not help but label current search behaviors underscored by bounce rates as anything less than browsing.

"{I'd love to see the ComScore report that says search is on the decline}"

This was for core search US only here is a link to some of the data - http://www.nodiamonds.com/organic-seo-benchmark.html

A great topic you opened up, apologize in advance if I strayed from the initial query in addressing the process opposed to the purpose.