how do clients search?

With over 1 billion websites online, it can be hard to get noticed. How do clients search for your business? What can you do to help them find you?

How do clients search for you?

Clients may use Google (a lot do), they may use Social Media, they may go to their favourite directory, they may go to a forum, and they may use search engines other than Google (bing, yahoo, duckduckgo). They may even phone a friend lol

• Google handles more than 2.5 trillion searches per year.
• 3.5 billion Google searches are made every day. (Internet Live Stats)
• An average internet user conducts between 3 and 4 Google searches per day
• 35% of product searches start on Google. (eMarketer)
• Google has indexed hundreds of billions of web pages. All told, the index is about 100,000,000 GB large. (Google)

Google Organic Search

For starters, let’s focus on Google Search and how clients may use Google to find you.  To get found on Google you need a website.  Also, it’s a good idea to get some SEO work done on your site to give Google some help to find you. 

Yes, you can learn the basics of SEO yourself but do you really want to spend your time learning about algorithms?  It’s much easier to pay someone like me to handle your SEO needs

I see many people on social media say ‘But I don’t need SEO!’ I personally see the benefits of SEO daily with my sites.  I spend nothing on advertising, just my time and I enjoy SEO so it’s not an issue. 

Your website and Google search are where your brand truly comes to life!

A quality website built to Google guidelines and a lesson or 2 on on-page SEO is often all your need as a small local business with little competition. Good Google rankings can be achieved without an ongoing SEO package.

What are clients looking for?

Who knows? Everyone has different needs, wants and different ways of searching. This is why Google has User Intent

We all search differently and search results vary from my computer to my phone to when I use voice search.  

User Intent

In previous blogs, I touched on ‘User Intent’ and how Google finds the information a user wants due to what Google sees as ‘user intent’.

Google is smart and annoying as hell! As an SEO I sometimes feel overwhelmed by how much Google keeps changing things, I read daily and some days the articles I read kind of freak me out

Google has this thing called machine learning – google learns from us just like in some of those computers that take over the world movies.

Is it Tron?  Where a computer takes over the world? I do sometimes wonder if Google is going to end up doing the same…

Google has the monopoly on search so if you are promoting a digital business, SEO is something that you need to consider

Everyone searches differently and has different user intent. How you may search for you, will be different to how I may try to find your services.

Keywords and Phrases

A keyword or keyphrase is what you type into Google; what thing you are searching for

With keyword research, we find out all the different keywords and opportunities for a brand. If we just used what was in our mind as to how others search, great keywords and keyphrases can be missed.  Did you know 50% of Google searches contain 4 words or more?

If someone is using voice search they are more likely to search how they speak.

According to PwC, 32% of people aged 18-64 use voice search daily.  This excellent article by Wordstream gives statistics on voice search

Voice is incredible for local businesses.  Voice changes how people search.

“I want help with digital marketing in Nowra” is more likely to be the search phrase with google voice rather than Digital Agency Nowra.

Why does a potential client click a link on Google?

It’s not just Google position that counts where clients will click,  It can be the wording shown on the Google search result that entices a client to connect.  These are called snippets & they are created by the meta used on your site

What makes them leave your website before your website loads?

There are plenty of reasons a client doesn’t actually go to the site but the main one is load speed

If a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load it starts to lose people quite rapidly.  
If it’s 10 seconds or longer, 50% of people will have left the site before it loads

I am site speed-obsessed and I have blogged on it a few times such as ‘Why site speed matters’

I hope you found this blog helpful

Until next time