Embrace your inner stats whore and attract better quality traffic to your website
15th May, '09
I am a stats whore. I am increasingly addicted to checking the statistics of websites that I run. One of my regular habits is checking the top search queries. Much to my amusement this was in the top searches for yesterday:
"i begin with t end with t and have it in me what am i"
I immediately thought the answer to the conundrum must be 'tit' and had visions of some poor sod searching the web to find the answer only to discover it was a practical joke set by his crossword loving yet totally hilarious friend. I still haven't worked out why my site is listed for that search term or the answer to the puzzle but it has made me think about search queries.
The length of search queries
From my anecdotal evidence I found that search queries are getting longer. Interestingly a Hitwise report published earlier this year found one and two word searches are getting relatively less common while longer search queries are becoming much frequently used.
|
Subject |
Jan-08 |
Dec-08 |
Jan-09 |
Year on year |
|
1 word |
20.96% |
20.70% |
20.29% |
-3% |
|
2 words |
24.91% |
24.13% |
23.65% |
-5% |
|
3 words |
22.03% |
21.94% |
21.92% |
0% |
|
4 words |
14.54% |
14.67% |
14.89% |
2% |
|
5 words |
8.20% |
8.37% |
8.68% |
6% |
|
6 words |
4.32% |
4.47% |
4.65% |
8% |
|
7 words |
2.23% |
2.40% |
2.49% |
12% |
|
8+ words |
2.81% |
3.31% |
3.43% |
22% |
The full report also has some other interesting statistics on search habits.
Search queries are getting more complicated
James Spanfeller is the CEO of forbes.com and claims his site gets 16 million unique visitors per month. It would be a safe bet to suggest that he is a stats whore too. At the OPA forum for the future in London earlier this month, Spanfeller made the analogy that the internet is currently in adolescence. This is an interesting analogy and accurately applies to the how users are growing up in the way they search.
For example Google is no longer used to just search the web. Amongst other things people use it as a calculator, currency converter and spellchecker. The types of queries we are putting into search engines is becoming more complicated. It appears that as search engines are returning more results for basic queries users are being more precise with their search phrases to find the data they are looking for.
Tweaking your SEO to benefit from longer and more complex search queries
Of the people I know who work on the web the most talented ones freely admit to being obsessed by statistics for their site. Of course it would just be vanity to check stats purely to inflate your own ego. The key to having a healthy stats addiction is to interpret the data and tweak your site accordingly.
So if search queries are getting longer and more complex should we be optimising our sites more for search phrases and less for individual keywords? A.J. Kohn suggests we should be optimising our SEO and PPC for numbers and dates:
"We know that users are using more words per query and that they're fond of reformulating queries using numbers. This should be enough evidence to implement a robust modifier strategy"
On the wallpaper.com website we get huge amounts of traffic for the search term "wallpaper" however people are not always searching for content about our core subject matter (architecture, art, lifestyle etc) but are actually looking for desktop wallpapers. The quality of the traffic is nowhere near as good as if someone searched for "directory of Chinese architects 2009".
Optimising for longer search phrases rather than individual keywords, targets the long tail of search and is a solid SEO strategy for driving quality traffic to your site.
Edit: virtual high five for the first person to solve the conundrum at the top! Bonus high fives for anyone who shares amusing search phrases from their own sites.
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Comments
Ciaran McNulty
A teapot?
May 15, 2009, 4:01 am
Russell
hmm, could be teapot. To be honest I really don't know the correct answer. I could try googling for the answer but I will probably just end up back here! Ha ha.
May 15, 2009, 4:11 am
Phil
trust.
Most likely not the desired answer, but I like it :)
May 15, 2009, 8:10 am
Russell
I think that most likely teapot is the correct answer and the original search query was misleading. So virtual high five @ciaran!
I read the clue as saying and I have "it" in me. So the answer would be in the format t----it----t where the dashed parts are unknown.
May 15, 2009, 10:46 am