Fast Facts from Search Engine Strategies Conference

I'm halfway through the amazing two-day Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto and wanted to share a few juicy tidbits with One Degree readers right away. I'll be posting more info gleaned from the conference over the coming weeks, but consider this an appetizer. Danny Sullivan, Editor of Search Engine Watch, proposed a new definition of search engine marketing: "desire expressed via keywords" and predicted that anywhere you can type in words, search marketing will be there.

According to Google, when Canadians search they are more likely to conduct broad (i.e., single word) searches versus more specific two or three-word searches. A two-stage eyetracking study by Enquiro revealed that the typical search engine user spends an average of 6.5 seconds 'reviewing' the returned results of a search inquiry before they click on one of the links. Since it would actually take much longer for the user to read all the results, they are not actually reading the results but instead are briefly scanning them (especially the titles) before making their decision on which link to click on. "Branded" search terms (search terms that are or feature brand names) are the top search terms and convert better, however as much as 15% of "brand traffic" is diverted by and to the competition. The new Ask.com search engine (formerly AskJeeves.com and sans butler) is fast becoming a major search player and is already the number three search engine in the US (behind Google and Yahoo). Watch out! Stay tuned for more from the Search Engine Strategies conference...

Comments

[Marc Poirier]

So where were all the exhibitors? I stopped by SES between 2 meetings on tuesday, and there were like maybe 8 or 9 of them.

Those who chose to dish out the money for a booth must have been pretty happy with the amount of time they could spend on one-on-one conversations.

There was no rush to get to all the booths, like in some of the other SES shows.