Chapter 1
How Search Has Changed Your Business
Twenty years ago, the World Wide Web as we know it today didn’t exist. Ten years ago, only early technology adopters used search engines, and Google was a struggling young upstart. Now, 92 percent of online Americans use search engines (nearly 60 percent do this every day).1 That’s a lot of potential customers who are looking for you, and those lists of search queries are a lot of market research about what those customers want.
Americans conduct more than 20 billion online searches a month,2 and worldwide, we type into a search box 131 billion times monthly. That’s 29 million searches per minute.3 (Google alone receives more than 1 billion unique visitors per month.)4
And what’s more, we trust the search results that are returned for our queries. An Edelman study found that search engines are our number one go-to source of data (beating news sources, friends, and source media).5 Neal Flieger, chair of Edelman’s research firm StrategyOne, said of the research: “People are behaving like smart consumers when it comes to news and information, turning first to search engines to see what is available on the topic they are interested in, and then seeking out traditional media to confirm or expand on what they learn.”6
It’s safe to say that we’ve become a searching culture (Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 Google Search Volume by Language
Source: Google Data Arts Team9
Just take a look at the 2011 Super Bowl to see this in action. Look at the ...
