MarketingSherpa have just released the transcripts from their teleseminar entitled "What's working in Search".   The information presented comes from several months of research and surveys including around 2,000 SEM companies, consumers/search users, research from their labs, and other sources.

The document covers trends in the search marketing industry itself, but also highlights a few trends with the nature of search.  Here's a couple of "take aways" that I found useful:

1. 54% of search phrases 3+ words

Over the past several years, there has been clear evidence that search user behaviour has changed.   A few years back, searchers would enter akey term (possibly broad) and then navigate a few pages of Google to locate a relevant result.  Today, if a user doesn't see what they want on the first page of Google or another search engine, they rarely (21% at most) navigate to the second page.  Instead, they refine their search by getting more specific.  This result fromMarketingSherpa demonstrates this trend clearly.


 

2. Organic clicks still dominate search

Great graph showing that natural/organic search still dominates on pure volume of clicks.

Here's what one of the hosts of the seminar Tim McAtee says about this:

I mean, part of why I really like this chart is just because it really demonstrates just how many more clicks over on the right are coming from natural search results, as opposed to paid search results on the left. And this search industry is pretty hung up, I find, on paid search, mostly because it’s easier to directly affect. I can go out. I can buy this. I can do this. So there’s some control over it.

But what this shows is that it's really, really important to put just as much time and effort into SEO and making sure that everything is lined up, you're getting high-quality words in your pages, you're coming up on all the relevant keywords, and you're really doing well on natural searches. Because that's when people are clicking.



Lot's of great stuff in the report (and the accompanying audio explanation) - would recommend you take a look.