Almost 30% of people need to redo their Google searches, either by refining or expanding queries, according to research published earlier this month by SEMRush, an online marketing software company.
SEMRush took data from 20,000 anonymous users who made 455,368 unique searches. He then looked at how long it took them to take a further action. For over 70% of users, it took less than 15 seconds to make a secondary click, meaning they likely found the website or answer they were looking for. Almost 30% of users, however, were refining, redoing or expanding their searches in some way, suggesting that for some, answers weren’t effectively filtering to the top.
That 30% figure comes from the 9.7% of users who engaged in a “Google Click,” meaning they clicked on images or something in a carousel after making a query. For those people, they may have actually found what they were looking for. Another 17.9% of users made modifications to “Google Keyword” or ways to modify their original query. This adds up to 27.6%, which was then rounded up by SEMRush.
Satisfaction was not measured in this study, just click behaviors after doing a Google search. A person may have been happy with an initial result and wanted to reformulate to investigate further.
SEMRush found that keyword conversions occur more often on mobile, 29.3% versus 17.9% on desktop. It suggests that people who need quick information may be searching for answers on Google rather than clicking on a website. Since the study didn’t survey users about their experience, it’s impossible to say exactly why someone on mobile is more often doing or refining their searches. Typos on a small screen can be a culprit.
On desktop, the study also found that 25.6% of results were “zero clicks.” This means that a person did not click on a link after making a query. It could mean that they refined their search or found the answer they were looking for without clicking on a link to a website. The latter could spell trouble for the billions of sites that rely on traffic to generate ad sales; while fewer clicks is better for people looking for quick answers, it hurts the many news and information sites that create this content.
“Google Search sends billions of clicks on websites every dayand we’ve sent more traffic to the open web every year since Google was created,” said Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search. “It’s not uncommon for people to search without knowing exactly what they’re looking for, then. refine that search after viewing the results and our refinement options (like related searches) to ultimately find what they need.”
Complaints about Search’s faltering reliability continue to surface in online discussions and articles. From Reddit thread to pieces The Atlantic, people say they’re fighting back against websites that try to game Google’s search engine optimization and the company’s own results filtering system. Search also remains Google’s most valuable product, with it controlling more than 92% of the online search market sharehelping the company generate advertising revenue.
Some users say they now use the short-form video platform TikTok to find the answers they’re looking for instead of Google. Maybe that’s why Google is getting on board more TikTok-like features in the search and why it was spent $100 million to buy an AI avatar startup.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reported $69 billion in revenue this past quarter, with $39.5 billion coming from “Google Search and others.” Even then, Google’s earnings were below analysts’ estimates.
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