It’s Good to Be the King

You may think it goes without saying that it’s good to come in first, but nothing in the search industry goes with saying, or measuring either. That’s why a survey conducted by Jupiter Media for search engine marketing firm iProspect set out to discover exactly what benefits there are to coming in first, or at least within the first few results pages for a keyword search.

The answer: Quite a few, mostly in volume of response from search users. According to the iProspect “Search Engine User Behavior Study”, which was released in April, 90% of users click on a search result they find in the first three pages, and 62% click on a result from the very first search page. Only 10% of searchers now click past the third results page for an average search.

And since iProspect has sponsored roughly the same user study twice before in the last four years, these findings can be trended to show the growing importance of turning up high in search results. The proportion of subjects who clicked on a first page result in 2004 was 60%, two percentage points lower than today; in 2002, it was only 48%. Conversely, in 2002 19% of users were willing to look deeper than the third results page to find the link they wanted, and in 2004 13% would do so.

At what point do searchers decide that a search they’re performing isn’t working? In the iProspect report, 41% of the respondents who failed at a search and revised it did so after reviewing the first page. That proportion is comparable to 2004, but it’s larger than in 2002, when only 28% said they judged their search a success or a failure on the basis of the first results page.

"Searchers are growing a little bit more fickle, in that they want to find what they want from their search right away,” says Rob Murray, president if iProspect. “If they don’t find it, they’re going to change something.” That makes it all the more important that companies optimize their Web pages to appear in a prominent position on the relevant keyword searches. (The survey didn’t examine the relative importance of appearing “above the fold”—that is, on the first screen of results, before the user has to scroll down the page.)

But increasingly, they’re changing their queries rather than changing search engines. Eighty-two percent of users who revise a failed search do so by putting longer or more complex terms into the same engine. By contrast, only 13% of respondents said they try the same failed keywords on a different search engine.

So four out of five users today believe that the answer to an unsuccessful search—however they define it, and knowing that most of them make that assessment on the first page-- is a more complex and specific one on the same engine.

That’s another trend that has grown. In the 2002 study, only 68% said they would respond to a failed search by entering more keywords into the same query box. (At that time, more than one in four said they would bail and use the same term on another search engine.)

“So what this study is saying is that marketers need to be found at the top of the search results, but they also need to be found on a broad array of terms,” Murray says. “You can’t know what specific terms people are going to be searching on. Marketers need to get beyond optimizing for single-word generic terms.” It’s a vindication of the “long tail” approach to search, as applied to organic rather than sponsored results.

The iProspect search behavior study holds out one particular bit of good news for small marketers trying to grow their brands on the Web. According to the report, more than one third of users believe that seeing a company Web site with a high organic ranking in a search result means that company must be one of the top brands in its category. This brand lift is even truer among the 25-44 demographic, where 40% ascribe brand prominence to a company with a top-ranked Web site.

“There really is a brand halo effect at work in Internet search,” says Murray. “It suggests that brands that have never been mainstream because they’ve failed to do traditional advertising can become major brands just by doing organic search well.”

Murray says in light of these results, Webmasters and online marketers should be in a state of continual search optimization.

“Here we are in 2006, people are probably on their fourth or fifth version of their Web sites and have spent tens of millions of dollars,” he says. “Spending that much money and not having an aggressive search optimization strategy is amazing to me. With query volumes growing monthly, your customers are either going to find you, or they’re going to find your competitors.”