The Get Elastic Blog has put together a number of videos on “The Crazy, Messed Up World of Ecommerce”. So far, they have four videos posted on the topic – “What if offline shopping was as cruel and difficult as buying online?” Here’s their first one on “If Only Search Engines Could Understand What We Want.”
Though this video is a humorous poke at search engines, the sad truth is that most sites stink at making their customers’ interests and concerns the focus of their websites. This is especially true for service providers who drone on about themselves, their firm, and the services they provide rather than addressing their prospects’ key problems.
Does your website attempt to understand what prospects are looking for and make it extremely easy for them to find the information they need?
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I am sure if you put “oranges, fruit” in a search engine you wouldn’t get an idiot trying to sell you a safety cone and a t-shirt. I’ll check out the other videos but the one above is just unrealistic.
Obviously, the piece is a bit of a satire, but the point is that most people go to search engines with a specific keyword in mind. For instance, they might first type in “orange”. If they do that, they’ll get results for mobile telephone services, Orange UK, the Wikipedia article on the fruit and the color, a short film by the Orange Open Movie Project, Orange mountain bikes, and so on.
Once they see their results aren’t mostly about fruit, they may type in +orange +fruit. If they do, they are more likely to get pages about the fruit – in Google, for instance, most of the entries are encyclopedia-like articles – but few pages that actually tell you how to buy the fruit.
From here, a searcher might go back to Google to type in +”buy orange” +fruit and when they do that, they get all sorts of results from fruit baskets to buying orange seeds or orange juices, etc.
So in that sense, the video is pretty accurate. Search engines can’t read your mind. They don’t know what your intention is. In the real world, if you want to buy an orange, you go to the grocery store and purchase it. There’s context there. With search engines, there’s no context, so you must keep working to refine your search until you get the results you want.
It’s actually a big problem. This report by eMarketer sums up the problems – that most people need multiple searches to find what they are looking for and that most searches start with generic terms.