The Importance of Search to a Marketer

As search engines have become essential to a web user’s Internet experience so has search become essential to a marketer. Search is important for a number of reasons:

Search is goal oriented: people use search to find the things they want and need.
The Internet is a highly competitive environment, with literally billions of pages in existence. So how does anyone find the page they’re after? Web users find what they need primarily via search. Search drives targeted traffic (and therefore sales) to web sites. A web search is a signal of intent from a web user.

Search engines are the doorway to the Internet.
According to comScore, 95% of the global Internet population visited a search engine in August
2007.

The search industry is BIG.
The daily search volume numbers are in the hundred millions. According to ComScore figures, there were more than 10 billion searches in the US alone during January 2008! That’s around 322 million per day.

To be found you must be visible.
If you want your web site to generate a significant amount of traffic, it needs to be listed on the major search engines and listed high up enough to be seen. Statistics show that users are not likely to view listings beyond the first 30 results, with the top 6 (above the fold) listings enjoying the lion’s share of clicks (Eyetools).

Top of search equates to top of mind awareness.

Beyond traffic, a high ranking web site is valuable for brand perception. Web users often perceive search engine results as an indication of authority. Search visibility promotes brand recognition and research has shown that search engine listings can stimulate brand recall by 220% (Enquiro, 2007).

People trust organic search.
Research has shown the people find organic results more relevant and more trusted than paid search results (Enquiro, 2004)

Catch potential customers at every phase of the buying cycle.
Most purchases are subject to a buying cycle. At different points in that cycle, prospects are searching with different key phrases. Give them what they want at each phase, and they will keep coming back till they’re ready to buy. In addition, they’ll be ready to buy more quickly because information is the best way to shorten the buying cycle.

Many people have a search engine as their browser home page.
Often, the home page of a browser is set to a search engine. Many users enter URLs into the search engine instead of the address bar of the browser – meaning that even if they know the URL of a web site, they are finding it through search.