Search is not the only way to the merch

By: Colin Cather | Creative Director

Google is massive.

Search is massive, 70,000 searches a SECOND. 

So massive, it’s easy to get search-bar fever. To translate all our objectives into their impact on search.  

Search is a big deal, but here’s another number you don’t hear so much about. 

Two, or three.

Two or three is the number of searches the average person does, a day. 

In fact, research (okay, in 2016) by Rand Fishkin suggests that only 15% of US searchers performed one or more searches in a day. 45% performed at least one query in a week, and 68% performed one or more queries that month.

We are not normal

At least, I’m not. If I needed yet another reminder of the marketers’ narcissism problem (‘you are not the same as your audience’) then it’s this: 

I Google searched stuff 47 times last Thursday. That’s far from normal. 

What the hell are normal people doing online, then?

If the searches themselves are less than a minute, and the results get less than 5 minutes (when did you last have a piece of content with a > 5 min dwell time?) then search is only about 10 mins a day, average. 

The rest of the time - the other 3 or 4 hours? 

Normal people are on social media - for a big chunk, maybe up to an hour a day.

They’re watching YouTube vids (part of the Google sites number in these pie charts).

They’re on news sites, aggregators like Google News, and yahoo, and traditional titles like the BBC and The Guardian (the Guardian has more daily views than the Daily Mail).

They’re playing games. 

They’re consuming content, reading, watching, listening, playing.

Now and again, they’re searching.

“I’m just looking.”

Online, just like IRL, we’re all mostly 

• Living,

• then Looking, 

• then sometimes. Buying. 

Optimising search is the equivalent of improving the bit when a diner is perusing the menus outside a street full of restaurants. Important. But not the whole story.

Or the shop assistant asking ‘can I help?’ as you’re sliding coat hangers along the rails. “No thanks, I’m just looking.”

What’s the point?

The point is: we need to keep that ‘Living. Looking. Buying.’ in balance when we’re creating onsite content, and stories for media.

We need to remember that not everything is optimised for search. In fact, most of the time brands are trying to be seen, noticed, to be distinctive, when no-one is looking - when they’re browsing and scrolling… 

The goals, and the design, of those stories, and content, are very different from ones that are optimised for search.