1..2..3..Search!

September 20th, 2006

When talking about search behaviour I think people really need to stop talking about “keywords”. They don’t exist anymore. No, really, they don’t. If you’re targeting paid search or SEO you need to be looking at key phrases.

Here is a bit of research from April 2006, questioning 205 web users who have >3 years web experience.

Source: HarvestDigital

As you can see, more experienced web users tend to use slightly more advanced queries, knowing this will yield higher quality search results. The searching and indexing of Internet data is maturing everyday along with user behaviour, I would expect these trends to continue and a move away from raw one word searches.