Search results and the amazing statistic.  A recent survey found that almost 30% of searchers didn't find what they wanted, amazing!   By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

I saw some survey results conducted by Harris and MSN. In their results, they showed that almost 30% of people searching didn't find what they were looking for. The same number also expressed a general dissatisfaction with search results. Such is the state of search results on the internet today. Now many people using search recently don't remember the good old days in the early 90's where it was extremely hard to find information. In fact, Yahoo was probably one of the most reliable search engines and that was merely their directory! So I come from the standpoint that things are multiple times better than way back then. 

But this statistic from the survey brings up another set of questions. How is it that people aren't finding what they're looking for? Isn't the internet adding a million pages per day by one estimate? Doesn't all this additional information make almost everything available online? Well, evidently it doesn't. I'm not as interested in what people find or that men search for electronics while women search for clothing. All that is kind of meaningless. I'm more interested in why people aren't getting to the information they need and end up frustrated to the tune of 30%.

I'm beginning to believe that search engine relevancy is somewhat of a myth. It's true that there has been a great improvement over the years and most of the time you can find what you want. But in the case of the 30% dissatisfied, who are these people? Are they newbies? Are they AOL subscribers? No, I don't think so, that would be too easy to just dismiss it as that. I'm going to go out on a limb that it's two things that make this factor so high. First, it's the way people search. Many still search too generically. When they're looking for a twisted red widget, they simply type in the term "widget". This is huge if people aren't being specific enough, which could be the case if people haven't take a quick lesson on how to search. The search engines should offer some flash demo on how to search deeper for more specific information.

One the other side, most websites are not optimized so people can locate the information needed. This means that just a standard generic listing won't do if you're going to get found by people. It takes more than that. It takes someone with experience and the knowledge who knows the way to the top of the search results page to make a website more relevant. It's these two factors that cause this 30% dissatisfaction I believe. It really has nothing to do with the search engines themselves. They provide results based on relevancy, so either we need to be specific in our searches or need to provide better content for our websites.   

It's an amazing statistic, this 30% dissatisfaction of search results. What can we do to help people find our websites? Your goal should not be trying to trick search engines into getting higher rankings in a quickie manner. The way to get better listings is to take a long term approach. Every search engine has guidelines for what they consider to be spam, so be aware of that. Search engines like Google are simply trying to get the most relevant results for people searching. Be aware, do some research on what might be difficult in your offering to find and make changes that could increase visibility in the search results. There's 30% of the searchers out there who hope you do!