Longer Search Queries Are Becoming the Norm: What It Means for SEO

Monday, June 8th, 2015 at 5:04 pm

Searchers are becom­ing more refined in their search inquiries by using “sen­tence” type queries into the search fields of the search engines, so what does that mean for Small Busi­ness owners? User search queries can no longer be con­sid­ered in terms of the basic key­words and key­word phrases that com­prise them. In the early days of SEO, many peo­ple relied on short phrases to find what they were look­ing for, but the way peo­ple use search engines is chang­ing. Peo­ple are rely­ing on longer queries to find what they’re look­ing for, and this increas­ing trend demands action on the part of search mar­keters everywhere.

Why Search Queries Are Becom­ing Longer

As with most mar­ket trends, there’s no sin­gle rea­son why user queries are get­ting longer. It’s the result of a com­bi­na­tion of dif­fer­ent fac­tors and it cer­tainly didn’t hap­pen overnight. Under­stand­ing the back­ground and con­text of these longer search queries can help you bet­ter pre­pare for the result­ing changes in user search patterns.

Seman­tic Search Capabilities

First, a fun­da­men­tal change in how Google inter­prets user queries has dri­ven the change in user behav­ior. Back when Google first started, it broke apart user queries into its fun­da­men­tal com­po­nents (key­words), and searched for those com­po­nents as they appeared exactly on the web. Sites that had the most key­words match­ing the user’s query would rank on top. Today, Google uses a process called “seman­tic search,” which ana­lyzes the inten­tion of a user’s query, then searches for sites whose capa­bil­i­ties make them good fits for serv­ing that inten­tion. Because of this change, users are find­ing the tra­di­tional, short, keyword-based queries to be less effec­tive at get­ting rel­e­vant results than longer, more con­ver­sa­tional queries. In fact, many users are ask­ing full, spe­cific ques­tions rather than search­ing for a gen­eral topic.

Avail­abil­ity of Information

The sheer amount of infor­ma­tion avail­able on the web has increased dra­mat­i­cally since the dawn of the dig­i­tal era, and it con­tin­ues to increase expo­nen­tially every day. In order to find the most rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion in the clut­tered, pos­si­bly over­sat­u­rated web, users are forced to come up with longer, more spe­cific queries. Sim­ple, generic, or ambigu­ous searches will only return gen­eral infor­ma­tion like Wikipedia arti­cles or the home pages of major brands. To get bet­ter, more use­ful infor­ma­tion, longer queries are necessary.

Mobile Devices and Voice Searches

Few peo­ple enjoy typ­ing. Because typ­ing has been the pri­mary means of sub­mit­ting search queries, users have stuck to a min­i­mal­ist approach. With the rise in pop­u­lar­ity of mobile devices, typ­ing has actu­ally become even more dif­fi­cult and annoy­ing for many users as screen sizes are smaller, lead­ing to more dif­fi­culty from a dex­ter­ity stand­point. To add to this, fea­tures like auto­cor­rect bring accu­racy into the fold as a major issue. The alter­na­tive, which exists in the form of per­sonal dig­i­tal assis­tants like Apple’s Siri, is voice-based search­ing. More peo­ple are using voice func­tion­al­ity to run their searches, and because of this, more queries are becom­ing con­ver­sa­tional and infor­mal. That means users are rely­ing on more col­lo­quial and sentence-based struc­tures to do their searching.

How Busi­nesses Can Take Action

Now that you real­ize the moti­vat­ing fac­tors for this increas­ing trend, you can take action to get in front of it. As with any SEO strat­egy, it’s going to take time for these tac­tics to start tak­ing effect, so start early and stay con­sis­tent in order to see the great­est even­tual results.

Elim­i­na­tion of Key­word Based Strategies

Your first step is to elim­i­nate any trace of keyword-based SEO tac­tics from your over­all cam­paign. Stuff­ing your site’s titles, descrip­tions, and arti­cles with key­words in the hopes of rank­ing for asso­ci­ated user queries is no longer effec­tive. Google doesn’t even con­sider key­word match­ing as part of its rank­ing algo­rithm any­more, and user queries are so long and com­plex that it wouldn’t mat­ter even if it did. Add to that the fact that over-stuffing your site with key­words can actu­ally earn you a rank­ing penalty, and try­ing to rank by using spe­cific key­words becomes a poten­tial disaster.

Long-Tail Key­word Optimization

Instead of rely­ing on key­word tac­tics, start look­ing at things from a higher per­spec­tive: long-tail key­words. Don’t let the “key­word” por­tion of that term fool you; long-tail key­words are just top­ics and extended phrases that peo­ple are search­ing for. For exam­ple, “who is the best podi­a­trist in Orlando” is an exam­ple of a long-tail key­word phrase. Rather than opti­miz­ing for these phrases by includ­ing them ver­ba­tim on your site (like with a con­ven­tional key­word strat­egy), you’ll be writ­ing top­ics that address these phrases and improv­ing your site pages to make sure Google clearly under­stands the pur­pose and posi­tion of your company.

Niche Con­tent Top­ics
Finally, because user queries are becom­ing even more tar­geted and the web is fill­ing up with even greater vol­umes of con­tent, it’s more impor­tant than ever to have a niche. Your area of exper­tise as a busi­ness should be as spe­cific as pos­si­ble, and accord­ingly, your top­ics should give very spe­cific answers to very spe­cific ques­tions. If your strat­egy is too generic or too broad, you’ll eas­ily become lost in the fold.
SEO is always evolv­ing. Google rolls out more and more updates to increase the sophis­ti­ca­tion and capa­bil­i­ties of its search func­tion­al­ity, and users adapt to use that search func­tion in newer, bet­ter ways. If you want to stay ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion and get the most online vis­i­bil­ity for your brand, you’ll need to under­stand and respond to these changes proac­tively. If you haven’t already started opti­miz­ing for longer user search queries, now is the time to start.

Guest Blog­ger:

Jayson DeMers
June 8, 2015
Search Engine Watch