Google Searches More Focused

February 8th, 2008

At a recent "invitation only" event Google Analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik gave an interesting presentation based on some key facts and figures.

The data Kaushik had gathered on Google queries provided the following information:

1. The average number of words per query to Google has gone up from 3 words to 4 in the last quarter of 2007
2. Paid searches account for about 14% of Google clicks, while just 86% of clicks are organic
3. 25% of queries made in a month on Google are unique for that month.

The implications of these points of data are very important for all search marketers indeed.

The Way People Search "Matures"

The increase in the number of words per query indicates a maturity in the search market as it shows that people are more focused and aware of what they are searching for. It is reckoned that "1-word queries" tend to be typically navigational queries, longer query strings typically indicating that the person searching has a specific objective in mind. Why are they using more keywords in the query, I would imagine that these days, with more and more sites coming on line,they are having to, to filter out irrelevant sites and hone in on what they really want.

Basically as more and more information becomes available online, more targeted searching becomes a necessity when looking for particular information, products and services.

SEO v PPC

The other big news is that according to Kaushik ’s data, 6 times as many clicks are counted on organic search results as on ppc links, which irrefutably implies a need for companies to focus on SEO.

The Long Tail Keywords Really Matter Now

With more and more focused searches being made, optimising sites for lots of related keywords becomes more and more useful. True, long tail searches for any term as very low, but put together, all of these queries often amount to much more searches than the total searches carried out for the top high-traffic keywords.

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