Percent Of Long Search Queries Increasing

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, May 9, 2009 Leave a comment

Google’s share of search keeps going up while Yahoo!s keeps going down. MSN Live’s is going back up again. These figures make me wonder when Yahoo! will no longer hold the No. 2 spot in search.


But the real story is here:

(Source) The length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length have increased 7 percent between April 2009 and April 2008.

This is very significant for search engine optimization. The implications are enormous.

First, if search queries are getting longer it must mean that the average searcher is getting more comfortable making searches. That means they’ll be more specific in what they look for. For the webmaster it means more opportunities to be found for the key phrase you are targeting.

I think this is the beginning of a long trend. I don’t mean that search queries will get longer and longer. I do mean that 7% will increase. More and more people will begin to query longer phrases that will do two things:

  1. Narrow the field of results in the SERPs (at least over the short term)
  2. Increase the searchers’ chance to find what she is looking for

As more and more people figure out how longer search queries will help them, more and more webmasters will learn how to write content that matches those queries. One of the things that webmasters will have to figure out is how to know which keyword-based phrase is the best one to target. Like all things search engine optimization and search marketing, that will come with much experimenting and testing.

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