It’s always interesting to see the trends in marketing online. How are people looking for information online?
For me, it continues to be a Google search using keyword phrases that closely describe what I’m looking for. I find searches like these to be very useful most of the time and if not, I can tweak the words I’m using to find what I’m looking for.
So it’s no surprise to me that organic search continues to be a preferred means of locating information online – and growing too.
According to new data from comScore, over 131 billion searches were conducted worldwide in December, 2009, a 46% increase over December ‘08. Searches in the U.S. alone grew by 22%, despite the country’s now two-year old recession.
And the U.S. continues to be the largest country on Earth when you consider online searches. While growth for 2008-2009 was much larger in countries like Russia (92%), France (61%) and Brazil (53%), the U.S. still accounts for the lion’s share of online searches.
So where do these searches originate from?
Well as we’ve reported here, Google still handles the majority of online searches – over 67% in December, 2009 with 58% growth between 12/2008 and 12/2009. And not just search engines are included in this list, which reflects a large number of searchers who go beyond the “core” search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. Ebay came in 5th with 2.1 billion searches, growing by 58% year-over-year. Facebook handled 1.6 billion searches, a 43% increase year-over-year.
Data like this underscores the importance of optimizing websites for the search engines. It’s clear that an increasing number of Internet users rely on organic search to find what they’re looking for online.
How do you locate information online?