The Eightfold Logic Blog

SEO is Not Bullshit

May 5th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Unfortunately for some, it can seem to be when you put your trust in the wrong hands. On Monday, (May 2, 2010), a well-known SEO - Rae Hoffman, also known as sugarrae, wrote an excellent piece demolishing a poorly informed “insights into SEO” type article about why Big Brands don’t Rank. I’m not going to dive into the details of that article; if you haven’t already done so, you can read it for yourself (and make sure to read Rae’s as well to understand how off base it was).

The point is bad SEO analysis and advice continues to plague online marketing, and unfortunately some of the bad advice sometimes comes from individuals or firms that could be considered authorities. Bad advice of the kind published in the Big Brands article on Monday immediately undermines credibility of quality SEO, and makes all businesses more skeptical and cautious about investing in this area of online marketing.

The reality is, proper SEO is not bullshit. It’s not witchcraft, and great SEO’s don’t really practice their dark art doing things to web pages and web sites that are beyond the scope of anyone without years of insights and training. I know tons of great SEO’s who don’t have years of experience, and some great SEO’s who have operated under the radar, unrecognized for years. There’s also some well known individuals associated with the industry who are not great SEO’s, but they are great marketers. The reality is:

  • Great SEO’s don’t care about just driving traffic; they work to drive up conversions, or increase branding.
  • Great SEO is not just about the html on the page, it’s also about off-page (links), and the on-page content which drives conversions or awareness.
  • Great SEO is not an IT project; it’s customer acquisition, branding and sales. Why does marketing let it be shoved into the status of an IT project? That’s a warning sign of a company that doesn’t understand the value of marketing online.
  • Great SEO is a component of Online Marketing. Just like PPC, social, links, display, email, and even your own web site.
  • Most great SEO’s won’t provide a 5-minute analysis that will solve all your site’s issues. Your site is likely far too messed up for a 5-minute solution!
  • Great SEO is not a one-off job. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is not credible.
  • Many great SEO’s won’t be found on “Top Ten” lists. Not because they’re not qualified, but because they don’t market themselves that way, and generally, they are too busy. (Plus most top ten lists are just linkbait)
  • A lot of great marketers write “Top Ten” lists: They want attention because it drives customer acquisition. Aaron Wall recently published a “Top Ten SEO’s” list, and lots of people blogged and tweeted about it, arguing about who was, and wasn’t on the list. The point was it drove lots of attention and traffic to Aaron’s site, which is what he set out to achieve. Great online marketing, and SEO for “Top Ten SEO’s”!

I could write out / share a lot of information and details around each of these points about great SEO, but there’s not much point. There are lots of great articles filled with very useful information published about SEO each day. Even better, there are great SEO’s out there who can provide you credible insights to act upon, and who can help your entire marketing strategy become much more effective.

Bad SEO, and poor quality advice is trouble. It’s trouble for everyone associated to online marketing, because bad advice and experiences makes companies gun-shy about investing again. When companies pull out of SEO they do so not because the channel doesn’t work, but because their implementation was badly done. When you pull out of SEO, you’re undermining yourself and marketing your business without a strong foundation. SEO is about more than just html, it’s about conversion optimization, site architecture, and optimizing the user experience: it’s sales and it’s marketing. Get rid of all that, and you’ve just thrown most of your business potential out the window.

You might wonder: what do I know? Well, After having spent over 10 years in this industry, I’ve had the chance to see, hear, and observe a heck of a lot. I’m lucky enough to be invited to speak at a lot of conferences worldwide, not because I’m always the most exciting speaker, but because I have relevant information and a lot of experience. I earned that experience doing online marketing for B2B sites with less than 100 search referrals / month (to start), and B2C ones with over 750,000 search referrals / day, and more importantly: thousands of conversions per day, (when I was done).

So what do I know? Maybe not much. But I do know this: SEO is NOT Bullshit.


Enquisite Suite Update - April 2010

April 22nd, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Earlier this week we released an update to the Enquisite reporting suite, extending the functionality of some key components. We are very excited to share the news, and outline the features and benefits with you. Many of these changes are very significant, and are benefits unique to Enquisite: you can’t do most of these things with any other analytics package on the marketplace.

Cross-Domain and Sub-Domain Tracking
We’ve added the ability to track actions and conversions across different domains and display the results as a unified reporting set. This is particularity useful if a booking engine or shopping cart is hosted on a separate domain, or if multiple domains all point in to one site for conversion purposes. Please note that cross-domain and sub-domain tracking will require assistance from the Enquisite team to implement: it’s not complicated, and shouldn’t require any effort from you. If you would like to take advantage of these new capabilities, please send us an email at [email protected].

Sub-Domain Tracking
Cookies can now be tracked across sub-domains and we now tie sub-domain activity together using a single Enquisite tracking code. This allows you to take advantage of our entire platform of functionality while ensuring accurate cross-channel attribution of actions and conversions, no matter where your customers go on your site.

Advanced Organic Keyword Predictions
We are already widely regarded as industry leader in Organic Keyword Research and Predictive Analysis. But being the best isn’t good enough. There’s always room to improve. During the last year, our research scientists have been working hard to enhance the core algorithms and validation routines that deliver predictive keyword suggestions to Enquisite Campaign users. This update is a major step forward on a lot of fronts, and it means you’ll benefit even more than ever from our predictive insights far in advance of the rest of your competitors in the marketplace.

Advanced Regex Segmentation
Enquisite’s Search and Social Analytics platform, Optimizer, is recognized by advanced search marketers as the fastest and most accurate way to segmenting your search traffic. We’ve enhanced your ability to segment by adding the ability for you to take advantage of the most powerful commands in the regular expression (regex) database query set.

In doing so, we have opened up a whole new way to look at your search data. These newly added commands can also function with lists, meaning that if there is a large selection of keywords that you need to work with you simply create a list, and use the list within an expression. Advanced segmentation functions are available when using the ‘contains’ and ‘does not contain’ match type in the Optimizer Longtail segmentation panel. Commands and variables include:

* An asterix is any number of characters,
? A question mark is a single wild character.
| The pipe symbol denotes alternation (either of a number of alternatives).
() Parentheses may be used to group items into a single item. (e.g. (a|b|c))
{x} Brackets indicate a list substitution where ‘x’ is the name of the defined list of words
\ Backward Slash before a control character denotes it as that character not the command (e.g. ” \ * ” is the ” * ” character, not a wildcard)

The search marketers we previewed the regex features to were absolutely thrilled. It makes the management of large datasets so much easier on a lot of levels, and saves them days of work each month.

We Want Your Feedback
We are eager to get any thoughts or suggestions on improvements or new features that you would like to see in the Enquisite Performance Suite in order to exceed your expectations and best meets your needs. You can submit your ideas at [email protected].


Enquisite Linker is Now Available!

March 23rd, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Enquisite is thrilled to release our latest offering, Enquisite Linker into pre-commercial release today. We’ve been preparing the application for a while, and are amazed at how many people have already signed up! In fact, we had a mini pre-launch by invite only. The response was great, and on launch we flicked the switch, and contextually relevant introductions started being sent out. Now, anyone can join.

I’ve spent a lot of time today speaking with people here at SES New York. Lots of great comments and feedback. People absolutely love the fact that this system is not a link exchange, nor a link network, nor a system by which we buy, sell, or broker links. None of that. It’s very simply a transparent introduction service which matches your defined business objectives with the goals of others, and provides introductions based on symmetrical interests.

I wanted to get this post out earlier today, but got so busy, I failed to post this earlier. I’d like to walk you through the steps of Linker, so that you can read more than just buzz.

When you join Enquisite Linker, you register for access to the system, and receive a username and password. Some Linker users are Enquisite Search & Social Analytics clients, but many are not. We don’t treat you differently in either case. However, as a Linker only user, you don’t get access to all the advanced reporting features in the rest of the Enquisite suite. But you don’t need it to leverage the full power of Linker either.

I often describe Linker as a dating service for webmasters and marketers to connect with each other based on contextual relevance. Like a dating service, success is measured by successful introductions.

When you first log in to Linker, you’ll get directed to the Site Profile screen. On subsequent visits, you’ll be directed to the Summary page.

The Site Profile screen is where you define your web site.

On this page, you define what site you are representing, what business categories it belongs to, and where it is geographically located. For a lot of businesses, geography matters. Beyond that, we ask for some keywords which describe your business, and additional classifying information. Once you’ve completed the information, we look up other, objective information such as your PageRank and mozRank. This completes your site profile. Some businesses will have multiple site profiles, because they operate multiple locations which service different geographies. Remember, the system is about driving contextual relevance.

Next, you need to complete the linking criteria page. Dating services feature match criteria about whom you would like to be introduced to. Enquisite Linker does the same, but the criteria defines which sites would be ideal matches for your business objectives. Again, it’s all about contextual relevance.

So here, it’s much like the site profile you completed earlier, except that you’re defining whom you are willing to accept introductions to. If a webmaster represents a site which doesn’t match your needs, you never get introduced.

In addition to the qualifiers you set up on your own site profile, here, you define what the ideal site possesses for PageRank, mozRank, etc. Again, objective, third-party values.

When you complete your profile, the system takes over. Whenever a new site joins the network, we check to see if it’s a match to your defined needs, and if so, whether or not your site matches theirs. If there is a bilateral match, we email you to advise you thereof, and you log-in to Enquisite Linker to review, approve, or reject the introduction. That part of the process happens on the Linker Summary page, which is now your default login page. Across the top, you can review your history-to-date: How many introductions are new, how many have you accepted, and how many have resulted in an introductory email to yourself and a match.


Here, you see a list of all available matches, ranked by overall score. Click a listing, and review the details. Prior to any listing appearing as a potential match, one of our quality control agents will review both sites to ensure suitability and relevance. This will also keep down spam, and help ensure greater relevance:

Once you’ve reviewed the details, you can decide to accept, reject, or think about the introduction. The details page disclose your business categories, geography, and scores. It doesn’t disclose any identifying information to anyone.

If you accept the potential introduction, our system waits for the other party to do the same. Once both accept, the system will email both of you a contact email, so that you can connect, and set a time to meet. At this point, Enquisite Linker has done it’s job, and it’s up to you to discuss the suitability of the link.

It’s pretty simple really. A very complicated piece of software and algorithms, which you really can set up once, and then have it deliver value for years.

I should note that as a business evolves, you can edit, add or remove linking criteria and site profile information on as needed basis. The market evolves, and so do your needs.

Ready to get going: Sign up for Linker today!


Another Patent for Enquisite!

March 23rd, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Just over a month ago, I posted a note on this blog, recording my feeling at having a patent issued. I was excited.

This week, I’m at SES NY, and am thrilled at lots of amazing things which are occurring this week. First up, I am happy to report that today, Enquisite has had a second patent issued. It’s Patent number 7,685,191, and the Abstract describes it as “Selection of advertisements to present on a web page or other destination based on search activities of users who selected the destination.” If you’re interested you can read the whole thing over at the USPTO office site. If you do, let me know, please.


More on Social Reporting in Enquisite

February 10th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Yesterday, I posted about Enquisite adding a Social Tracking function to our reporting suite. I got quite a bit of email expressing interest in knowing more. In re-reading my post, I also felt a little egg on my face for making the beginner mistake of leaving a [LINK] comment in the post, and not making it live – sorry. Stupid mistakes are easy to make; when you mess up, clean it up!

Anyhow, most of the email & DM’s via twitter (@rzwicky) asked for more info, and screenshots. Beginner mistake #2 – always include screenshots whenever possible so readers know what you are describing. I do realize that none of you can look inside my head and see what I do, so why the heck would I assume that you could visualize what I’m writing about without a picture? When I used to do SEO full-time, I always explained to clients that a picture’s worth a thousand words to human visitors, but zero to the search engines. Why would I ignore such a basic tenet of providing meaningful information? Text is great, but a picture seals the deal. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is one lengthy document!

So, this post is about correcting yesterday’s errors, and providing more insights into Enquisite Social Reports.

We created Enquisite Optimizer’s Social reports to help provide online marketers with perspective. Last year I spent a fair bit of time talking to all sorts of online marketers: search marketers, social search marketers, social marketers, video optimization specialists, etc., and also VP’s of marketing and CMO’s.

What struck me about social was everyone talked about social, but no one seemed to understand how it related to any of their other marketing activities, nor what conversions it really drove. We already were collecting all the user referral data, but didn’t display the social information. Looking at the information, I realized that while there are some apps which help you understand how many referrals you get from any one channel, there’s no holistic views. For example, when you do a post using bit.ly’s service, you can track how many click through you’re getting from the U.S., but you do have not context as to real geography. We already were reporting on search referrals down to the zip code, so why not do the same with Social? Why not make it possible to track a social push, show where the traffic spiked geographically, and then look at the search referral traffic to see how it compared? Did it follow a similar pattern? Did conversion rates go up? How does one benefit the other? This information was missing from the discussion.

Social marketing offers a huge potential of opportunities in branding, driving visitors, raising awareness, and delivering valued customers to a business. But it’s not a stand-alone channel; it’s a piece of the puzzle. We’ve added social reporting to offer businesses some perspective, so that you can start to understand how they really fit together. For example, take this series of screenshots from Enquisite Social Reports, and then compare it against our Longtail search analytics report.

First off, we have a Longtail type view into social referrals, using categories as a definition. Instead of just reporting on all the referring sites, we added a category layer, so that you can understand the traffic types at a higher layer. In this screenshot you can see that for the particular website being looked at, shopping and consumer review types of social networks deliver the best conversion rates relative to overall social traffic.

In the upper left corner of the screenshot, you should also be able to see the site-wide bounce rate, page view rate and average time on site for referrals from social marketing. Watch how this number changes, and compares against search referral traffic.

Next up, we segmented out just the shopping and consumer review types of social sites – note the segmentation panel. I’ve also dropped in Twitter, as I wanted to see how it related. Note how the traffic quality improves as shown by the increased time on site / pages viewed, and lowered bounce rate.

Now, in this next step, we’ve segmented out social referrals to just ones that came from within the U.S., and are showing this information on the map. Look at the distribution pattern of visitors from social search, and keep this in mind for the comparison to search referrals to come later.

Drilling in to the map view, we have two important perspectives: 1) where do the referrals come from, city by city, and 2) then the following screenshot shows us where visitors were really located when they purchased a product as a result of a referral from a social network or social marketing initiative.

Now let’s compare this against search referrals in Enquisite Optimizer’s Longtail reports. First off, the bounce rate is much lower from search, and the pages viewed and time on site are much higher. So a more engaged visitor from search.

At the present time, search is sending almost 100x the referral traffic that social is to this site. However, to be fair, the business in question hasn’t really engaged a full-on social campaign. More like dipping their toes so far. But, all of a sudden they are recognizing value where they couldn’t before, in that they can understand the conversion rates better, and also they can compare and understand how the two traffic sites overlap.

Finally, let’s look at the map of search referral traffic. First up are referral rates.

Obviously, unlike the social referrals, the search traffic to this business is very broadly dispersed. Looking at conversion rates however, a different trend emerges:

Interesting how the Pacific Northwest is over-represented for conversions, relative to search referrals.

Finally, let’s compare that against conversions that were generated from social marketing, and we can see similar patterns emerge, with certain locations better represented proportionally.

These screenshots were built using the same time range throughout. When tracking specific campaigns, you can get much more granular to understand time lag.

Additionally, for marketers and business operators who want to understand the financial contribution of any channel to the bottom line, we offer Enquisite Campaign, which was designed from the ground up to report on, and provide predictive analysis of opportunities across all online marketing channels, and let online marketers, VP’s, CMO’s and CFO’s understand how the various channels interact, and combine together to contribute to revenue.

Marketing via Social networks is still in the early days, and the impact is usually difficult to understand. But a combined perspective on Search and Social will continue to become ever more important to any online marketer. We recognize that marketers are having a hard time measuring the impact of both channels, independently and together, so we’re bringing some perspective to the marketplace.

Businesses need perspective to properly invest in worthwhile initiatives. We provide insights to act.


Enquisite Adds Social Reports

February 9th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

This evening, we’re adding a new set of reports to Enquisite’s Optimizer product.

Optimizer has been Enquisite’s core search analytics service since launch. Late last year we added a links tracking module to the reports, as search marketers needed to be able to monitor which links when live when, and more importantly which links pointing in to a web site stopped sending traffic, or had huge spikes in referrals. These additions were designed to help the search marketer monitor more of their traffic sources that affected their search campaigns. We’re taking that logic further with tonight’s release.

Tonight, Enquisite is adding a layer of Social Marketing tracking functionality to our reporting. The search marketing industry has grown considerably over the last year and a half, and so have we. Social networks were still nascent, and their impact was hard to understand. But a combined perspective on Search and Social (not just the firm Search and Social) has become very important to any online marketer. We recognize that marketers are having a hard time measuring the impact of both channels, independently and together, so we’re bring perspective to the marketplace.

Enquisite Campaign was designed from the ground up to report on, and provide predictive analysis of opportunities across channels, and let online marketers, VP’s, CMO’s and CFO’s understand how the various channels interact, and combine together to contribute to revenue. Businesses need that perspective to invest.

Today’s addition to Enquisite Optimizer adds a “Social” tab to the reporting suite. Now, you can understand all your social campaign referrals from within one interface, and also view that traffic geographically via our mapping interface. Plus, you can compare that against your paid and organic search campaigns.

Do you really know how your social campaigns are affecting your search campaigns? Now, you can see where social referrals are coming from, and map that against your search referrals. Do the geographies overlap? What’s the lag time? How does it affect referral quality and conversion rates? These are all questions that for the first time you can now answer.

Log in, take a look, and provide us feedback of what else you would like to see added in Optimizer’s Social reports.

In March we’ll be making a significant addition to Enquisite’s suite of products in the area of linking. Linking continues to present a myriad of challenges for search marketers, and the amount of spam generated in this area is massive. We’re going to help you cut through the noise and implement more effective linking campaigns. We’ll be contacting all Enquisite account holders with an early participation offer shortly, keep your eyes peeled, you won’t want to miss it.


How a patent came to be

February 3rd, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Many, many years ago when I was a youngster growing up, I read lots of books about people like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. I marveled at how many things they had invented, and the effects just the things they patented still had on our lives.

At the time, I never expected to be in a position where I would have my name associated with a published patent.

Yesterday, a patent I wrote was issued. It’s patent number 7,657,626, and refers to an original method of detecting click fraud. It’s a dry read, so I’m not sure if you want to rush out and read it, but if you’re having a hard time sleeping, you can find the patent here, at the USPTO office.

Now, in no way do I consider that this one issued patent in any way puts me, or any of my ideas in the league of these great inventors or innovators, but I am thrilled nonetheless. To have an idea recognized as truly original in this process is special, and I truly feel honored, and am indebted to everyone who helped guide me through the process.

Of all the things I’ve done, this one really was like a light bulb going on. The idea came to me over a holiday weekend a few years ago. My son and I were enjoying a boy’s weekend getaway at our cabin at a lake near Victoria. I’d been deep in data looking at random server activity data all week, so playing around in the water, cooking meals over the fire, and staring at the night sky was a welcome change. The second night I went to bed around 11, and was out solid until 2:30 a.m. I woke up with a start and an idea in my head. Normally, like most people I’d just roll over and go back to sleep, telling myself that I’d deal with it in the morning, by which time I’d forget about it. But this time, I grabbed a pen and paper and started writing. Two hours later I was stuck; I’d written many pages of notes, and long-form formulae / processes, but something was missing. I put the notes away and went back to sleep.

The next day I spent being very busy doing nothing! I didn’t even read my notes from the night before, figuring that I could get back to it after the weekend. That night, I woke up at 3:00 a.m., with an idea how to break through the last barrier in the process. I started writing, and that night completed what turned out to be the first draft of the provisional patent application.

The following week I sat down with our Mathematican, Rafael Parra Hernandez, and he helped me take my long-form formulae and convert them to more conventional mathematics. He also explained to me the various types of math I had incorporated in the processes. If my high-school math teachers could see it now, they’d never believe it!

And, that’s how a patent came to be.


Enquisite Suite Update - December 2009

December 23rd, 2009 by Richard Zwicky

To end 2009 we’ve updated and added to Enquisite’s Suite of search marketing tools and products. In fact, there are three major enhancements available to you today, plus a new product in pre-release:

  • The Enquisite Performance Dashboard
  • A Fresh New Look for a New Year
  • Feature Enhancement: Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Campaign
  • A really cool new product in pre-release

The Enquisite Performance Dashboard

We’ve added a new Enquisite Performance Dashboard to provide you with an at-a-glance overview of all your website’s critical search activity metrics as well as a summary of the performance data for each of your campaigns.

Marketers keep saying that 2010 is the year of the Dashboard, and if the prognosticators are correct, we’re kicking it off right with the first phase of a vital new report to help you understand what facets of your online marketing campaigns are driving your success.

By starting your day with a quick glance at your dashboard, you’ll be able to see trends in your search activity on a site-by-site basis, and know which campaigns you need to focus on for improvement and which ones you can refine to further enhance the performance of your business.

We recognize that everyone always wants slightly different information on their own dashboard, or to be able to pull information from one application into something else. We’ve got API’s for you!

A Fresh New Look for a New Year

When you next log into the Enquisite Performance Suite, you’ll immediately notice a dramatic improvement in the load speed, and look and feel of the platform. We are constantly listenening to your feedback on how to make the application easier to use, and have incorporated these suggestions into the new user interface. Among the many improvements of the new design, the new taskbar will greatly simplify the process of building and managing your campaigns. The overall navigation of the application has been streamlined to make the application easier to use and to improve your overall experience with it. Of course, none of that matters if the application doesn’t get faster too.


Enquisite is the fastest real-time analytics application on the market. Search marketers want to spend most of their time improving SEO and PPC campaigns, not analyzing and reporting. You need insights to act quickly. Enquisite is the only real-time search intelligence and decision support application on the market. With Enquisite, you don’t need to spend 80% of your time figuring out what to do, you can spend that time making a difference to the bottom line of your business!

Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Campaign

In our last release, Enquisite provided you with the ability to export segments created in Enquisite Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign. In the current release we enhanced this feature, giving you more options to where you export segment data from Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign.

This feature is found within the “Longtail” section of Enquisite Optimizer, which allows you to segment actual search referral traffic in real-time. Within the Longtail, you can partition actual search referral data on the fly by a variety of dimensions, including geographic location, referring search engine, actions, and conversions. Once you have created a segment of search referral traffic, Optimizer allows you to find the specific keyword phrases of searches from users of that segment that led them to your website. The feature now allows you to take these keywords that you discover and directly import them into either a new campaign or an existing campaign within Enquisite Campaign.

With this new feature, you can now quickly and easily take your analysis of past search referral data in Enquisite Optimizer and use it to better craft your future organic search-based campaigns within Enquisite Campaign.

A really cool new product in pre-release

As you are aware, Enquisite is a company founded on innovation. The very first beta product iteration back in 2005 included our patent-pending technology to extract, and report on keyword referral data based on the position the keyword was listed to browsers in the search engine results. That reporting was a break-through for search marketers hoping to report value more accurately to their clients, and also making it possible to be more sophisticated in optimization strategies. Now, with Google’s Personalized Search updates, that technology is more valuable than ever to search marketers.

That was our very first beta version. We’ve now got many very distinct patents-pending, some of which are incorporated into our Auditor, Optimizer and Campaign products. We’ve never sat still, and have continued to innovate to drive value for our clients.

This brings us to our latest product which we plan to release in Q1 of 2010. In the short term, this initial phase of the product will be available to partners as we ramp up. It’s a very cool, simple to use application which addresses the links pillar of SEO in a novel and fundamental manner. This product doesn’t compete with analysis apps like SEOmoz’s Linkscape. In fact, we’ll be incorporating some of SEOmoz’s data into ours to help your analysis: it offers search marketers something completely different, and incredibly valuable.

If links, and link-building are important to you, (yes they’re important for everybody), then you’ll need this product, or you’ll quickly be left in the dust by your competitors.

We’ll be announcing more around this new product as it approaches release in the New Year. If you want to be part of the pre-release as we move forward, let me know, and we’ll add you to the list as soon as possible.


Search Engine Market Share by Click Through Activity - December 2009

December 21st, 2009 by Richard Zwicky

Surprisingly, I haven’t posted a search engine market share report in 30 days. We did post lots of other interesting data in the interim however. This week, we’re getting back to the evolving search engine landscape. Of course, not a lot overall has changed since our last look at the data.

Google continues to own almost 80% of the actual click through market share. We recognize that our numbers are different from some other reports. The core difference is our reports reflect click through activity, as opposed to general activity. As demonstrated in the post “how long is normal,” while most search lookup activity is on one word queries, click throughs occur most often on three-word searches. The same holds true for the various engines. A lot of people apparently run searches on Bing / Yahoo, but they refine their searches prior to clicking through. Hence, Google shows a much higher market share when we examine just click through activity.

As it relates to the change in activity over the last month, Bing continues to show strong forward momentum, and Yahoo continues to fade away. Sad, really. Google’s decline which started in June appears to have stabilized at a dominating ~78.4% market share. If we look at areas outside the US, Google’s share is even higher.

For convenience, this graph shows the change in Yahoo / Bing / and other non-google shares since May 2009. If you want to look at the raw data that for back you can view it on the prior blog post about search engine market shares. The data table is getting so long however that we’ll just show the last 4 months from here on out. I’m using an “all-time” chart to show the trends though.

The raw data for those who prefer the numbers:

Google Yahoo Bing Other
September 7 78.68% 11.51%  6.80%  3.01%
September 14 78.35% 11.13%  6.50%  4.02%
September 21 77.43% 11.35%  7.11%  4.11%
September 28 77.65% 10.80%  7.27%  4.28%
October 4 77.78% 10.66%  7.23%  4.33%
October 12 77.78% 10.66%  7.21%  4.35%
October 18 77.89% 10.65%  7.29%  4.17%
October 25 77.83% 10.56%  7.56%  4.05%
November 1 77.75% 10.46%  7.66%  4.12%
November 8 77.96% 10.21%  7.75%  4.08%
November 15 77.60% 10.39%  7.59%  4.42%
November 22 77.59% 10.41%  7.67%  4.37%
December 22 78.43%  9.73%  7.86%  3.97%

Enquisite collects data from a network of thousands of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, accessed by searchers located in the U.S., and reflects click-through activity data.


Is Longer Better? What the Best Length for a Query?

December 17th, 2009 by Richard Zwicky

In my recent post, “How Long is Normal?” I published data which showed that based on click through rate, four-word queries are more common than one-word queries, and five-word ones are almost as common.

Today, I’m adding to that information with an additional layer showing a correlation between the number of words used in a query and the time on site, and pages viewed.

One would assume that a more specific query would result in longer time on site and pages viewed. Surprisingly, That’s not the case. In fact it appears that the more specific a query, the more a search referral visitor’s behaviour will reflect a decisive intent and higher level of sophistication in how they navigate web sites. They use the search process to pre-filter results more aggressively, and then they get to the point of their visit very quickly.

This information will of course have implications for bounce rate reporting, as a significant number of search referrals which normally could be classified as bounces more likely indicate a higher than expected level of satisfaction with the results.

Words in Query Percentage of Queries Avg Pages Viewed Avg Time on site
1 11.08% 6.64 4:32
2 24.56% 4.13 2:53
3 25.77% 3.06 1:57
4 17.68% 2.62 1:42
5 10.03% 2.29 1:27
6 5.36% 2.11 1:21
7 2.65% 1.97 1.14
8 1.36% 1.84 1:07
9 0.70% 1.74 1:04
10 0.37% 1.69 0:59

The longest query recorded in this data sample was a search referral with 594 “keywords” in it. Likely it was someone was searching for exact copies of an article, either to identify plagiarism, or link opportunities.

So, if this is “normal” for the Internet, how does your site match up? Interesting to think of this as one more way to determine if your web site’s SEO strategy is healthy.

About the data. Enquisite works with thousands of sites worldwide and captures a trove of relevant search-related data every day. The browser shares reported here are based on data from a selection of Enquisite-tagged sites that cumulatively represent over 350 million page views/month, across most major industry sectors - a very significant sample size. The information published reported solely reflects our data.