Recap of ‘Searcher Behavior Research Update’ - SES San Jose 2007

One of the SES sessions I initially thought might least apply to small and medium-sized businesses ended up being one of the most enlightening. All four of the panelists (Pavan Li of Microsoft, James Lamberti of ComScore, Stuart McKelvey of TMP Directional Marketing, and Oliver Deighton of Google) .

Pavan was up first, discussing a key purchasing segment of the population: soccer moms. Despite their importance as consumers, there’s very little data available about how they use search engines in online and offline purchasing. Microsoft conducted an online survey of moms with one child, 18 years or younger, and received 991 respondents.

The results:

• Moms are tenacious, search-savvy, “tenacious.” Two-thirds of moms use search after seeing an advertisement, and 60% are college-educated, with $100K annual family income.
• The Internet was the leading media source in terms of time spent per day — 36% of moms used the Internet more than three hours per day, and 95% of stay-at-home moms have been online for 7+ years.
• Moms will modify search or go through multiple pages rather than switch to a different search engine (bad news if you’re not Google!).
• More than half used search engines to find the best price, or special promotions.
• The higher the cost of the product, the more likely search would be used in purchase decision.
• 80% of moms have searched for at least one packaged good (deodorant, baby care, etc), despite the fact that these aren’t traditionally viewed as online purchases. In this case they were looking for prices, store locations.

James Lamberti of ComScore talked about his company’s “Digital Shelf” study based on collaboration with SEMPO, Yahoo, and Procter & Gamble. The key takeaways:

• Search needs to be used for branding as well as traditional ecommerce, as it helps build long-term brand loyalty.
• Typical searchers are actually not as interested in a coupon as you might think. They want information and help in making their decision. (although 47% were still looking for a coupon). 29% just want to find a company’s website, in which case SEO efforts should be pretty minimal.
• Searchers are more likely to use all KINDS of different media beyond just search. Kellogg’s spent millions on packaging, advertising to link organic to their brands…not one PPC ad.

Oliver Deighton of Google emphasized the importance of being at the top of the SERP in terms of both organic AND sponsored listings, giving a 16% boost in branding to companies that were in both. Additionally, competitors lost branding share with this situation. Even branded keywords offer a 7% boost. Most of searchers’ eyeball fixation is on the headline and in the URL — but although he recommended that your brand name lead for big brands I’m not sure this applies for small businesses whose customers have shorter purchasing horizons.

To close, Stuart McKelvey gave what I thought was one of the best presentations of the entire conference, of course, as it was one of the few tied to local and small business search.

Stuart detailed a ComScore study from the first quarter of 2007 which showed that local search is growing at a 20% clip year-over-year (over 1 Billion searches in March). The 3,000+ respondents were asked a series of questions related to a nice, broad spectrum of local products and services: Pizza, Home Services, Auto Services, Moving and Storage, Banking and Finance, and Insurance.

The key takeaways:

The Yellow Pages are shockingly popular. 33% looked to the Print Yellow Pages and 17% to Internet Yellow Pages as their primary source of local business information. Search engines and Local search totaled 30% and 13% respectively, with a number of miscellaneous sources making up the other 5%. Interestingly, though, respondents who used the Yellow Pages were far more likely to be looking for a particular, pre-identified business (44% vs. 25%) than searchers. And 65% of Internet Yellow Pages and Local searchers were looking for a service, rather than a product.

Translation: search is critical for people still in the “research” phase of decision-making or purchasing.

I’d look for the Yellow Pages fixation to drop in the coming months as users get more and more comfortable with Google Universal, Yahoo Local, AskCity and similar services, due to their increasing integration in normal SERP flow.

Your business needs to be within a 20-mile radius of your target customers. Location was cited as the most important factor in deciding to contact a business, with about 45% of respondents coming to that conclusion. Familiarity with that business was second with about 40%, and customer reviews, which are becoming hotter and hotter on Google Local, Yelp, etc., came in a distant but still significant third at 15%.

With Local businesses, offline conversion is still king. 50% of local searchers only contact one business, and 30% contact between 2-5. This sounds like a shocking number of people who are only interested in the top search result BUT if you consider that 44% of Yellow Pages users and 25% of internet searchers already know the business they’re looking for, that’s a much less surprising statistic. In-store visits and telephone calls were the most frequent type of contact, with a 45% clip for both. Only 17% of respondents contacted a business via an online form. Only 4-8% of respondents bought via website…so, if you’re a small business and looking for a place to shave a few extra $$, DON’T shell out for a complicated shopping cart system for your website. Make sure you consider your increase in OFFLINE traffic as a result of a new website or search marketing campaign, or else you won’t get a true sense of your ROI for the project.
There’s still a tremendous lack of understanding among the general public of how search engines work.
8/10 searchers think that businesses that appear at the top of local results paid for it, and 60% believe that the top organic results are most relevant to their query. Other interesting data: 40% of searchers dont think they should have to scroll to see results (so if you’re not in the top 4-5 results–including the Local Map–buy an ad), and 30% stated using internet for researching, not buying.