Reps from comScore, Nielsen Online, and Hitwise spoke last week in a “SearchScape” session at SMX West, and while they all shared some interesting numbers, it was Bill Tancer of Hitwise who really opened my eyes with data about searcher behavior.
The long tail is getting longer; 1- and 2-word queries are on the decline, while 4- and 5-word queries are rising. Even 3-word queries are down slightly, but not enough (in my opinion) to call it part of the trend just yet. Here’s Bill’s chart from last week’s session:
Words/Query 2009 2008 2007 1 word 20.4% 21.1% 24.5% 2 words 23.6% 24.9% 25.7% 3 words 21.8% 21.9% 20.7% 4 words 14.9% 14.5% 13.3% 5 words 8.7% 8.2% 7.5%
Four-word queries are up 12% since 2007, and five-word queries are up 16%.
This fits in with a point I made during my presentation on hyperlocal blogging, and which I wrote about on Hyperlocal Blogger — namely, that people are searching for everything online, and our local blogs are seeing a wide variety of long-tail queries bringing searchers to our blogs.
Update, Feb. 24th: Hitwise has formally published & updated the numbers from this SMX West presentation. I’ve written about it (pretty chart included) on Search Engine Land.
One More Thing…
The other eye-popping stat from this session was shared by comScore’s Eli Goodman:
Yahoo Answers, About.com, and Answers.com received more than 169 million search click-throughs in December, 2008. That’s a lot of clicks going to answer/reference sites.
February 17, 2009 - 4:12 am
Very interesting information and what I would expect to see. The Answer posts surprised me though, I had no idea that many searches were going through those posts. I have always discounted the importance of those posts. No more.
February 17, 2009 - 8:18 am
[...] behavioral campaign, tailored to customer’s patterns rather than the keyword tool(s) suggestions. To read more click here. ~SammieAnnie [...]
February 17, 2009 - 1:06 pm
[...] Searchers Using Longer Queries in 2009, Small Business SEM [...]
February 18, 2009 - 2:45 am
Wow, Matt, your belief in Yahoo! Answers is proving wise in a big way. I remember when you were first writing about it. So far, my user experience with it has been that most of the answers given are pretty unhelpful, but every so often, I’ve come across good and thorough answers there. They really do show up in the SERPs frequently for how-to and what-is kinds of questions. Neat stats.
The long tail data is amazing! And frankly, it almost could be said to tie in with the Yahoo! Answers, About.com etc. phenomenon. Search queries like, “how to get wine stains out” lead naturally to those answer-type results. Somehow, its all tied in, or at least, your post has made me think so!
Miriam
February 18, 2009 - 8:09 am
Interesting information. Thanks for sharing.
February 18, 2009 - 10:39 am
Great info especially w/graphic support. I’d be interested in knowing the categorical segregation of long-tail inquiries if such data exists.
February 18, 2009 - 11:10 pm
Good information! Good to know these trends
February 19, 2009 - 4:03 am
I’ve definitely seen an increase in long tail traffic across all 3 of my sites – and although it’s a bit more time consuming to get trend data on a high number of longer tail terms, it does seem to be the case that we get better conversions the longer the search term.
February 19, 2009 - 10:54 am
Excellent info. Makes me want to reevaluate our long tail PPC strategy.
February 20, 2009 - 9:20 am
One of these days, I’d like to collate the search terms that bring traffic to the four local blogs my wife and I write — sometimes 7-8 word queries! It’s been amazing to see what kind of local searches people do.
February 23, 2009 - 5:01 pm
This is excellent information, it just shows that visitors to all sites are getting more search savvy…I would be interested to see the breakdown by year by the top 3 search networks.
Based on the different demographics for each search engine, this would be interesting to see how this impacts the long tail data.
February 24, 2009 - 12:07 am
[...] Matt McGee reports, Hitwise’s Bill Tancer revealed at a recent conference that the percentage of [...]
February 24, 2009 - 5:12 am
[...] about searcher behavior, people are using more words in search queries [...]
February 24, 2009 - 3:19 pm
[...] all the way up to 8+ word queries are becoming more common. The numbers are very similar to what Hitwise shared at SMX West a couple weeks [...]
February 24, 2009 - 3:19 pm
[...] all the way up to 8+ word queries are becoming more common. The numbers are very similar to what Hitwise shared at SMX West a couple weeks [...]
February 25, 2009 - 2:40 am
[...] two or three words. And possibly why more people are using the long tail (4 and 5 word queries). Matt McGee reckons that the reason behind the increased use of long tail search terms is that people are now [...]
February 27, 2009 - 6:31 am
[...] Finally, for our graphical pleasure today, we round off these trends with “teach in korea” which Google Labs appear to have less data on “teaching in korea” and “jobs in korea”, but definitely a bit more than “Teach english in korea.” I’m wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that four word keyword searches have been rising, but traditionally have been a lot less than 3 word sear…. [...]
March 2, 2009 - 3:08 pm
[...] Matt McGee berichtet, wie sich das Suchverhalten in den letzten Jahren geändert hat (in US, also eine gewisse zeitliche Verschiebung zu uns angenommen). Laut Studie nahm die Suche nach nur einem Wort kontinuierlich ab – von 24,5 auf 21,1 auf 20,4 Prozent in den letzten drei Jahren! Geschätzt werden in 2009 rund 23,6 Prozent der Suchanfragen (”Queries”) zwei Wörter beinhalten, aber selbst dieser Anteil sinkt im Vergleich zu den”Longtail-Anfragen” mit 3,4,5,x Anfragen. [...]
March 30, 2009 - 12:01 pm
[...] sites takes a lot of time and resources. We’ve all heard by now that more users are using long tail queries as opposed to general [...]
May 12, 2009 - 9:36 am
I am no expert but if more words are being used to drill down to more relevant content than this must be good news for the small businesses. For example, I am a hypnotherapist and I couldn’t expect to be on page 1 for the keyword “hypnosis” but I have a better chance of being ranked on page 1 for “stop smoking hypnosis london”
September 9, 2009 - 10:16 pm
[...] My friend and search marketing colleague, Matt McGee, recently had a post on his blog about the trend toward longer queries. I can easily see where Google’s presentation of longer snippets will only accelerate this [...]