Marketing Now

How Search Has Changed Your Business

Twenty years ago, the World Wide Web as we know it today didn’t exist. Ten years ago, only early technology adopters used search engines, and Google was a struggling young upstart. Now, over 50 percent of on- line Americans use search engines every day and over 90 percent of them use search engines every month. That’s a lot of potential customers who are looking for you and a lot of market research about what those cus- tomers want.

Americans conduct 22.7 billion online searches a month¹ and worldwide, we type into a search box monthly 131 billion times. That’s 29 million searches per minute.² It’s safe to say that we’ve become a searching culture. Just take a look at the 2009 Super Bowl to see this in action. Look at the spiking searches on Google the morning of the big game. Thirty-five of the top 100 have the word “Super Bowl” in them, and another 27 are Super Bowl-related (see Figure 1.1).³

Business leaders know that the world is changing. More customer research and transactions take place online now than ever before, and those numbers are only going to increase. Globally, the number of searches grew 46 percent in 2009. According to Jack Flanagan, com-Score executive vice president, “Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among Internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks.

If you equate the advancement of search with the ability of humans to cultivate information, then the world is rapidly becoming a more knowledgeable ecosystem.”⁴ But many professionals simply aren’t sure how to evolve their businesses to best take advantage of this changing landscape. This book will show you how to think about your business in a new way, to better connect with your customers through search, and to weave the value that search provides into all aspects of your organization.

Through organic search, you can reach potential customers at the very moment they are considering a purchase and provide them information exactly when they are looking for it. While many businesses are attempting to connect with their potential customers through paid search (such as with Google AdWords), the opportunity to reach these customers through organic search—the results that are algorithmically generated rather than paid for—remains largely untapped. In fact, 88 percent of online search dollars are spent on paid results, even though 85 percent of searchers click on organic results.⁵ Search is a fairly unique opportunity to connect with your potential customers.

Never before have we had access to such remarkable amounts of data about potential customers. We know what they search for (and what they don’t). We know how they shop and how they buy. We can even find out where they look on a page. Businesses spend such significant amounts of time and money on market research, focus groups, and usability studies, yet so many fail to augment this information with the abundance of free data available from those 113 billion searches a month.

We don’t have to look farther than our local newspapers to see how consumer behavior has changed. The newspaper industry spent years trying to get readers to return to their old behaviors of expecting the newspaper at their doors every morning, and reading the stories as they were laid out in print. But those readers had moved on to searching online for news on topics of interest and getting that information in real time rather than a day late. Similarly, companies have to adapt and evolve with their customers instead of attempting to get their customers to return to their old ways.

Notes:

1. comscore.com, June 2009.

2. http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/
Global_Search_Market_Grows_46_Percent_in_2009.

3. http://searchengineland.com/can-searchers-find-the-superbowl-
16396 (accessed February 2009).

4. http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/
Global_Search_Market_Grows_46_Percent_in_2009.

5. Enquisite Performance Suite^TM. www.enquisite.com.

Source: Vanessa Fox, “Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy is Your Business Strategy,” JohnWiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2010

Republished by Marketing Now

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