Hitwise, an Experian company released a report late last month that shows search behaviour is changing—searchers are using more words in the search queries they type. As the following figure suggests, this shift in behaviour is small but significant. The percentage of queries using five or more words, for example, has increased at more than 10% each year.
Search Query Length at Google and Other Engines
What does this mean for SEO?
Long search queries present a challenge for search engine optimization. They tend to fall in the long tail of the search spectrum, as we discuss in on our post on How People Search. It’s hard to justify optimization activities focused on rarely-sought terms, so you’ll need to rely on your content management solution to embed best practices.
What does this mean for conversion rates?
The answer to this question is not clear. In fact, there has been remarkably little research into how conversion rates vary in relation to the number of terms in the search query. My gut tells me that a person searching on something specific – like “Sony Bravia, 52 inch, on special or sale, Boise” – is more likely to purchase than someone searching on “bigscreen tv.” But actual on-the-ground evidence is thin.
Last year, NLC undertook a detailed analysis of search behaviour based on data released by AOL. As part of that multi-page post, we noted that OneUpWeb released a study in 2005 that found that searchers using longer search queries are more likely to convert - but this study was performed four (long) years ago. To the best of my knowledge, no follow-up studies have been done on this topic.
The evidence at non~linear creations
Today, I pulled NLC’s analytics for the last two years to see if visitors using longer search queries had stronger conversion rates on our website. As the following figure suggests, they most certainly did not. In our case, visitors searching on a single word are almost three times as likely to convert as those entering a three-word search query.
The trouble is, we have no way of knowing if this is the norm. Perhaps visitor behaviour on our site is atypical. Certainly, many of those downloading our whitepapers are searching for single-word brand names, particularly “Sitecore”. This might skew the data in favour of short queries. On the other hand, our whitepapers show high conversion rates for those searching on “content management best practices” (8.6% conversion rate) and “Google search appliance implementation” (10.7% conversion rate).
The Bottom Line
Searchers are using more terms in their search queries, and we have yet to understand the impact this has on conversion rates.
I hope to find out. Here’s my call to action – send me evidence from your web sites. I’ll publish the results here and perhaps we can arrive at a consensus of sorts.