Understanding How People Conduct Online Searches

Introduction

In order to manage your reputation online, you first have to understand how it is that people use search engines. While you may feel that it is the same way that you do, there are hundreds of different ways that people can conduct a search. Not to mention the dozens of different search engines that they have access to. Therefore, in this article, we are going to look at all the different ways that people conduct searches to help you to better understand how your target market could be thinking.

Search Engines

To start off with, we must first understand what it is that search engines actually do. You may be thinking to yourself, "well they search." Of course, they search, but how do they do what they do is more important. This goes far beyond the library searches in the old days. You would type in, or look up, the genre of the type of book you wanted and then you had even more lists to deal with. With search engines, they try to predict what they think you want to see. They take into account everything that you have provided to them in the past. You know those annoying boxes that pop up and you automatically click yes on? Well, they are harvesting information from you. They know your approximate age, your race, your location (if not house and street number, at least the city), where you shop, and so much more. The devices that we use store a lot of information about us, and you just clicked yes to sharing that information. We are not here to scare you, just simply telling you how it is.

Top Dog

Right now, the majority of the market shares of search engines belongs to Google. They get more than 60% of the searches. So, it would be wise if you geared your content to be Google friendly. Make sure that you keep up with all of Google's latest trends so that you can optimize the search results to help you. Just remember, you will not be able to ever know all that goes into the Google algorithms. They like to keep this a secret. The reason is that they want the search results to be organic. That means they want for people to dictate who is in the top spot. They do this by sending those sites the most traffic.

How They Search

When it comes to how people search, they either look for partial or full phrases. When they are looking for partial phrases, they type in as little as possible to get the result. Full phrases are generally complete sentences, including punctuation. Also, never underestimate the power of Google's autocomplete. Many people are using this as a means to complete their searches.

Conclusion

Your reputation online is not something you should take lightly. In order to get the best results, you need to understand how your customers are getting to you. One of these ways is understanding search engines and what makes them work. We will go more in depth at a later time on how search engines use algorithms to modify the incoming queries.