FASTforwardblog has an interesting interview with Susan Feldman, well known search researcher at IDC. She talks about research she did on advertising and referral from global search and her findings. She says that they took publicly available data on global search queries and data from sites using global search advertising and found a large 'hole' when she compared them. The 'hole' is in the number of people they expected to come from global search compared to the actual number of visitors. She estimates that over 70% of all users go directly to most sites and begin searching for the information they want instead of getting referred from global search engines. This is contrary to the belief that all web traffic is originating at Google or Yahoo. This fits my personal habits and the research that we have done. We have seen that most global referrals are very unspecific and it seems that the users are just using the global search engines as a guide to find sites. Once they have found it, they need not use the global search to find that site again but will rely on the site search.
What this means for site owners is an even bigger need to have an effective local search strategy. 70% of users are arriving at your 'front door' looking for the information instead of jumping directly to it via global search as many would have us believe.
Susan speaks of local advertising campaigns where large sites like Amazon can use their own search technology to direct content to users. This concept is exactly what MondoSearch's SearchHeader's feature is built for. When people search for things on your site, you need not only give them the content they have queried but can also direct some advertising their way. Our customer Coleman.com uses it to direct people to Coleman Powermate when they search for 'generators' as Coleman.com doesn't stock or sell generators.
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This feature is very versatile and helps users to get to the content they are looking for or even other interesting content, based on the site owners wishes, not the search engine's algorithms.
To hear more from Susan, I suggest you attend the Enterprise Search Summit held in New York in May where she will be a speaker.
To learn more about SearchHeaders, check our site.