3 main types of search engine searches.
There are three main ways people tend to search in search engines are navigational, informational and transactional. It is important to keep this in mind when optimizing for a site. When someone uses a search engine such as Google and type in a keyword, the SERPs (search engine results pages) will show up in the search engine. And what you choose to put in the Titles or descriptions can make a big difference on if people will click on your site depending on their intention.
Navigational Searches
Navigation search is when someone knows where they want to to, for example a particular web site. They’ll search for it and will most likely easily find it if they entered in the right search terms.
Example, if someone where searching for me they could type in “Kenny Harper”, they’d find me in the top results but there would be a couple other Kenny Harpers to sort through.
If they were to type “Kenny Harper Jacksonville” my personal site “kennyharperdesign.com” pops up top. And they effectively used the search engine for navigation.
Informational Searches
One could also use a search engine to find information about a particular product, service or topic. If someone wants to find out more about Twitter for instance they could enter “what is twitter for?”, “how to use twitter for business”, “what obsesses people to tweet?” each would provide different results but the point is they’d find information about a topic and not be going to a pre-determined destination.
Transactional Searches
I believe we’re all familiar with these types of searches. When we know what we want and we’re just looking for a place to get it. People may search for “i-phone”, “smart phone”, “new i-phone touch” and are looking to find a place to buy a particular product. They may be also just looking for information about the product as well.
How to use trends in peoples searches in optimizing a web site.
Keeping these different ways people search in mind when optimizing a site is important. You can add pages and optimize them differently to have a better chance to meet people’s desired result in the SERPs.
Other key things to keep in mind.
I’ll go in to it more in a later post but keep in mind that general terms are going to be very competitive and you shouldn’t base your SEO campaign on terms such as “tv repair” the competition will blow you away. Better to optimize for something more long-tail (specific) ex: “Jacksonville tv repair 32202″. You’d be better off to put your efforts in the more specific search term. You could rank good for that term and get more results overall.