A real estate agent recently mentioned to me that even though he's still in the top of Google for common terms about his local real estate market, his traffic is down significantly. What would explain this? How could this be possible? All indications are that his market (a southwest US city) is growing rapidly and the number of new residents in is climbing faster than other cities. One of the explanations that I’ve come to understand about search dynamics is that the general population of search engine users has changed significantly over the last 8 years – essentially consumers are now better conditioned and know how to use search engines and with greater efficiency. Many of us now know that to get better results in a search query we must use more focused terms and typically more terms. Think about how you use Google versus someone who is less adept. More advanced search users have matured to be more efficient with search. Those of us that are search power users (i.e., anyone that has used Google for more than five years) don’t realize how efficient we really are. Furthermore, as advanced Internet users we [mistakenly] assume that less experienced Internet users continue to do things the way all newcomers to Internet search do things. This is simply not the case – almost all search users are traversing much the same learning curve that more experienced users have – they are learning (with every query) that they can manipulate the results to get exactly what they want. The shift is ever so subtle – it’s almost impossible to detect, but it is there none-the-less. Armed with the ability to find exactly what they want, is it possible that searchers are skipping over high ranking terms that aren't so specific? As the population of Internet users continues to gain more understanding about efficient search it’s quite easy to predict that the use of popular, (sometimes ambiguous) terms will naturally decline. In simple terms, users have begun to skip over the one, two, or three word search phrases that may rank high as they attempt to find exactly what they want in the shortest possible time. Search users have learned through experience that somewhat ambiguous requests generally return somewhat ambiguous answers (not all the time, but many times). And they’ve learned that discrete requests get them closer to what they want – more accurately and sooner. Evidence that this trend is impacting engine design is also easily spotted – - 01/01/01 – Google increases the max words in a query to 10 (from 6)
- 01/027/05 – Google increase max words in a query to 32 (from 10)
- In 2004 most other search engines abandoned any keyword limits
Other aspects of Internet life are also impacting the way we use search engines – we have less time to spend searching, and we have machines to search for us (e.g., RSS is helping users skip over the manual search). Search agents are typically configured by users with greater thoughtfullness - users will take a little more time to think about exactly what they want their agents to find for them. Search agents typically increase the propensity for users to find long tail (highly focused) subjects and avoid short tail subjects. Another more serious invasion on short tail terms is the idea that search engines can give you proximity results. In the past, engines were compelled to help users find a web site that hopefully had an answer buried somewhere in the site. The reason they did this was because most sites weren’t designed in such a way that content was atomized into discrete pages with address that never changed. This is no longer the case – blogs and content management systems support “permalinks” – this gives the engines a way to recommend very specific pages for very specific requests that may lie deep inside a website. As such, they are no longer concerned about high-level [generalized] recommendations at the domain level because they can create proximity analyses very quickly and draw specific pages from many domains based on exactly what the searcher asked for. This begins to erode the idea that SEO on a domain is the objective; the more important challenge is to write good content where each page is about one thing, and one thing only. Unfortunately, most web pages (and home pages) are about many things so they are becomming less competitive for recommendations concerning specific subjects. As we continue to develop good proxies (i.e., smart agents and notification schemes for things we are looking for) and the one-billion strong Internet community learns more about search efficiency, your top rankings for common terms will continue to rank high, but they’ll be passed over for more direct information that cannot be easily predicted through traditional SEO means. Our challenge is to recognize how search users behave and shape our SEO campaigns to match their behaviors. If you sense your target audience is getting smarter about search, your campaigns must be reshaped to reflect that shift. | 
