SEO News Blog

I suppose that’s not a headline story, but I stumbled across some very interesting research data and I thought that it would be really nice to share it with you and confirm with statistics the fact that internet users are getting smarter and smarter and they are heavily exploiting search engine functions to better navigate their way in finding their desired information. Also as we’ve expected the growth in popularity is quite impressive and you must check it out.

Since the dot com boom (1994-1996) the internet is growing quite rapidly both in content (the number of websites) and in the same time in the number of it’s users, somehow becoming a way of life. I’m not going to exaggerate but yes we live in the Internet Era where massive amounts of information can be easily accessed and only with a single click you can find what you are looking for. This incredible network of information enables people to easily access virtually unlimited collection of shared user data on large variety of topics (in exception are only few countries like china that don’t have human rights and similar, but that’s only when politics collides with our freedom of information flow) and this improves our level of knowledge in particular interests quite drastically due to our new ability to find numerous documents without even leaving our home. In the recent past, libraries, newspapers and magazines were the only places where people can find information on events and discoveries but now things are so different and so easy for all of us. This ability to gather more and more information virtually effortless in such a short period of time enables humans to maximize their learning abilities and to obtain more and more knowledge n their particular field of interest.

North America has the largest percentage of internet users in the whole world mainly due to the fact that Internet for first time was developed in the US in early 1962 as a Government/Military Project for linking computers around the states in case of War, but quickly reshaped as very useful way to transfer information between two points. The first developers of the ARPNET project (the first name of the internet) were MIT and NPL, and they are considered to be the inventors of the internet. Actually our common understanding of the internet came far later in 1980 when students began exploiting the possibility to “host” public chat rooms and share information between each other by opening file servers. This quickly became popular and in early 1990’s the first public websites were born.

People quickly discovered the potential of the web and started sharing more and more information thus making the internet grow exponentially. Nowadays the internet demands are so high that about 69% of all North Americans use the internet at least once a month.

A Canadian media and search engine advertising company called SKOOIZ just released some fresh research data on the internet usage and behavior of French Canadians. In March 2007 they made a survey on 1272 Canadians and shared their research results with us.

What kind of search engines people are using?

Be prepared to be amazed! And the winner for French Canadian Search Engine is…. Google with 80%, followed by Yahoo 3.6% and MSN with 2.5%. That’s mainly due to the fact that there are not that many Multilanguage search engines. The US market on the other hand is a bit more diverse as it has few more search engines but still Google has about 44%, Yahoo with 28.7% and MSN with 12.5% of the total search queries which is still not bad.

How Many Keywords people use to form their Search Query?

I guess Canadians like all other people are somehow aware of the massive amount of information stored/index by search engines and know that the best way to find what they are looking for is to use more than one keyword for effectiveness. The French Canadians for example are quite intelligent searchers and only 10% of them have the time to look in the broad search results of single keyword queries. Fortunately the rest of the interviewed people were quite skillful as 50% used two keywords, 30% used three keywords and 10% four or more keywords.

This clearly shows that people are going for the long tail keywords and optimizing only for one and two words is merely not enough. Also optimizing for the low end long tail keywords is still quite easier and you can rank on top with merely no efforts at all. Few years back most people were going for few words because there was no competition, but now within those huge amounts of data it’s quite better to go for the long tail and hit your share of the 40% in the beginning and later on as you grow then target the high end keywords.

The new internet users use advanced search engine queries

The interesting thing that got my attention is the large number of people that use advanced search queries. About 50% of all French Canadian internet users use the advanced search operators for to optimize their queries from which 10% do that on regular basis. That explains the fair number of search engine queries our SEO Website CMS logged that containing logical operators in them, so its not only French Canadians that use that functionality. I guess this new trend spreads traffic even further and now even small websites have the chance to get visited if they contain that particular set of positive and negative keywords, but that’s really very rare cases.

How many result pages internet users view?

Everybody knows that the top 3 results get 60% of all the traffic and each lower ranking decreases your possible hits enormously. Thus being on the second page (lower than 10 positions) is almost like you don’t exist. French Canadians are no different. If not able to find what they are looking for, about 15% don’t even bother to go to the second page and immediately run a new query. Then about 40% of the people that bothered to view the second page simply give up and run new query. We can note that the funnel shaped traffic is mostly for the top 5 listings and the rest gets only a few clicks. In this sense, I’ve received so many responses from my clients that when they got to the top 3 their world turned around and from a keyword that they rarely got traffic is now their biggest hit. This happens in highly relevant keywords where people find what they are looking for on the top 3-5 results and don’t even bother to go beyond that. In such situations if you are you’re ranked on position N:7-8 even highly searched keywords and you might not get more than few clicks because visitors are happy with what they found on the listings above yours.

How many people click on Sponsored Search Engine Ads?

I’ve been trying to explain that thing to most of my clients, but it’s really hard for them to understand the benefits of organic search engine listings compared to pay-per whatever advertising. The Canadian research data clearly shows that only about 2%-5% of all users click often on advertisements and about 25% state that they “sometimes” click them. On the other hand 25% say that they never click on ads and about 50% very rarely clicks on ads. This statistics explain why a lot of advertisers get thousands ad impressions with few to no clicks at all for even great looking, highly relevant advertisement.

Organic Search Engine listings are the best advertising way as it get about 80-90% of all traffic (even more than that) and if you’re ranking good you will receive so much free traffic for the small fee of few hundred dollars in Website Search Engine Optimization expenses. It would be dumb to spend so much money on Pay-Per-Click when for quite less than that you can get free organic listings.

What Age Groups are general internet visitors?

The internet users are generally young people. The largest portion of the French Canadian internet users form 25% of all users and are between 25-34 years old, followed by 19% for 45-54. The rest is about 15% youngsters 18-24, 10% teenagers, 12% for 55 and older and on last place 9.7% people of age 35-44. This shows that large portion of website visitors are from 25 to 54 years old. This can be correlated to the income and education data shown below.

How much internet users earn?

The statistics show that the largest portion of internet users (about 30%) earn in the ranges between 30k-50k per year. Then about 15% earn about 50k-70k and again 15% above 70k. This most definitely means that internet users have some good money to spend online (proven by the greatly increasing online sales statistics with each year), so it won’t be a bad idea to start your own internet store (if you don’t already have one).

How often do you use the internet?

If it was me, I was going to say all the time, but in this case 87% of the interviewed French Canadians use it every day. This huge percentage in combination with some simple predictions on the past and current internet use can predict that with each passing year the number internet users is going to almost double and therefore user traffic is going to increase dramatically. We are talking about some really huge numbers that will be quite normal in few years, so start building up websites, optimize, build links and hit the wave as hard as you can.

For more information on their findings please see their report here and you can also discuss that in their official blog here. If you are interested in getting affordable search engine optimization services for you website contact me via the contact form or call 646-536-9268