There’s a piece on the BBC site about a recent survey by Jupiter Research and marketing firm iProspect. They came to some not very exciting conclusions about how people use search engines.
The basic finding was that if people don’t find what they want within the first three pages of results, they change their search term, change search engine or simply give up.
Three pages? It seems most people are more patient than I am. I don’t recall the last time I even tried page two.
More interesting, I thought, was this comment from Robert Murray, president of iProspect.
“They [users] know what they want, and they want to find it immediately, and the majority want to find it on page one.”
They know what they want.
This raises an obvious but important question. Does your web site give people what they want? Or is it more focused on what you, as a company, want to communicate or sell?
The bigger the disconnect between what you want to communicate and what your visitors want to find, the more worried you should be.
This brings us back to the issue of your value proposition.
If your value proposition is strong, it will be naturally aligned with what search engine users want and are looking for, simply because your business will be based on giving people what they want.
It is interesting to see how the Web, and search engines in particular, play a role in identifying the underlying strengths, and weaknesses, of companies online.
Before the Web, weak companies could remain undetected for a long time. Online, their weaknesses are identified a lot faster.
