Now that you understand the basics of Web visitor behavior, let's talk specifically about search. Web searchers have behaviors all their own that start with the query itself.
Throughout history, human beings have sought to bring order to information by sorting and grouping documents to find them when they need them. But the advent of computer information retrieval (that is, search) made possible a massive increase in the number of documents available to find the needed information. And mostly, that's good. The problem arises when we expect those poor human beings to know how to find information in a whole new way. Folks who are comfortable using library card catalogs, book indexes, and other paper techniques find that none of those skills translate into using Web search.Navigational searchers want to find a specific Web site (perhaps because they do not know the exact URL), and use queries such as "irs web site" or "valley hospital."
Informational searchers want information to answer their questions or to learn about a new subject, and use queries such as "what is scuba" or "hard water treatments."
Transactional searchers want to do something (buy something, sign up, enter a contest, and so forth), and use queries such as "sydney weather" or "treo 600 activation."
We need to examine each kind of searcher so that you can reach them with content from your Web site. Understand that real people shift roles all the timethe same searcher might enter informational queries to learn about a new product and suddenly decide to use a transactional query to buy it. A clear understanding of the types of searchers and their respective intent will help you reach more searchers with less effort.
Navigational searchers are looking for a specific Web site, perhaps because they have visited it in the past, or someone has told them about it, or because they have heard of a company and they just assume the site exists. Unlike other types of searchers, navigational searchers have just one right answer in mind. Chapter 10, "Get Your Site Indexed," if yours is not.
Make sure the search engines show a good description for your home page for searches on your company name. If you do not like what you see, add a strong sentence with your company name to your pagethe search engines will take that information and show it in the results. Figure 4-1 shows what can happen if you do not have a strong description.
Chapter 9, "Sell Your Search Marketing Proposal," for ideas about increasing the search exposure of your site and limiting the visibility of your detractors.
Because people often use navigational queries to locate a company when they cannot figure out how to type the URL directly, you might also consider registering domains for common misspellings of your company name. That way, people might find your company without resorting to navigational searches at all.
Informational searchers want to find deep information about a specific subject. Informational searchers believe this deep information exists, but they don't know where it's located. Unlike navigational queries, informational queries do not have a single right answerthe best search results are several pages from multiple sites that all shed some light on the subject.
Almost every Web user is an informational searcher at one time or another. Most searchers start with a simple query, refining it until they locate good answers (or give up). The intent of informational searchers proves the most difficult to deduce because their queries can mean so many things. Many informational searchers enter only a single phrase, such as "new york." Whether that searcher meant New York City or the State of New York, and whether she wants to visit New York or learn about its history, discerning her intent is next to impossible.
At the peak of the dotcom boom, a leading art and print site was spending millions of dollars on paid search placements for art-related search queries. The marketing manager knew that "monet" was one of its most heavily trafficked queries, but recently the visits from Yahoo! for "monet" had decreased significantly. What had changed?paid search clicksthey dropped even further. Worse, there were no more buyers of Monet prints even though overall traffic had doubled when you added up both paid and organic referrals. Why?
The marketing manager decided to perform a test. He added a survey to the new Monet page offering a drawing for a free print for anyone who would reveal their purpose in coming to the site. Of the survey respondents, 95 percent indicated they were students simply looking for biographical information on Monet and information about his paintings. These were informational searchers that had no desire to ever buy a Monet print.Chapter 11, "Choose Your Target Keywords"), and by optimizing your pages to meet those information needs (covered in Chapter 12, "Optimize Your Content"), you can attract informational searchers to your site.
Transactional searchers make things happen. They are not looking for informationthey want to do something. Transactional queries cluster around specific tasks, such as buying products, accessing databases, and downloading various types of files (images, software, or songs). When searchers enter the name of a book, or the model number of a digital camera, they are intending to make a transaction, namely to buy the item. But there are many other kinds of transactional queries. Anyone trying to download a fix for a computer, or signing up for a newsletter, or donating to a charity is a transactional searcher.
Transactional queries are the hardest of all queries to incorporate into an optimization program. Transactional queries are often related to specific products, and should return product catalog pages, which unfortunately have little content on them and do not rank well in search engines. The text-rich informational searcher pages that solved shoppers' problems with your products are gone, replaced by barren catalog pages with model numbers, specifications, and a picture. It is hard work to dress up these catalog pages for search engines.
The most important goal for improving these catalog pages is to make the search result's snippet relevant to the query. You improve your chances of both being found by the search engine and being clicked by the searcher by incorporating the query's words into the title and other parts of the page. In addition, you should feature any special pricing or other offer prominently on the page to catch the attention of the searcher. If your page can reassure searchers that it is a good choice, even better.
Figure 4-3 demonstrates why paid placement advertisements are not always clicked by searchers. Clearly the searcher is looking for a specific model of camera, yet all but the fifth result fail to incorporate the camera model into the offer. The other paid results might cause searchers to have to start from scratch and enter the model number all over again once they get to the Web site, a sure way to turn off searchers.
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