51% Search Engine Users feel ‘Misled’ by Search Results

Studies is digital marketing are always interesting to professionals in the field. For one, most digital marketers have a profound love for hard numbers and facts. In a field where things have a habit of becoming a little hazy, numbers and analytics bring light to complex situations. This is very true for digital marketing where technique and action can sometimes overshadow the need for hard cold numbers.

Take search marketing for instance. Both SEO and SEM, key pillars of using search engines for marketing, comprise of a number of different tactics. There are more than 200 factors Google takes into account while ranking websites, highlighting the degree of study which goes into understanding the field.

The same is true for SEM which involves paid search advertising in different formats and incorporating practises like bidding, keyword research, demographic targeting, and so on.

Given the insane amount of work that goes into both these search marketing techniques, it is difficult to get a sense of the overarching picture. This is where the need for digital marketing studies comes into the picture.

In this article, we discuss key takeaways from Brand Verity’s Consumer Trends survey.

51% People are Not Very Happy with their Search Results They Get

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the survey was that people are not exactly satisfied with the search results they get from search engines.

While the perception is that people are generally satisfied with the level of service and accuracy they get from Google, this study pours cold water over this belief. 51% people feel misled by the results they find after querying something.

What does this mean?

For one, people saying there is too much competition and nothing left to do in SEO are proven wrong. If more than half the people on search engines are not satisfied by the experience, there is plenty of room for new businesses and blogs to come in and provide people a good search experience.

63% Users Have no Idea How Search Engines Work

An interesting tidbit from the survey was that only 37% people using search engines know that the SERP listings are based on content relevance and ad spending.

Only 37%.

This is great news for digital marketing professionals in general. If consumers know more about search marketing, getting an organic response from them during marketing campaigns becomes more difficult. In simple words, no marketer wants to target an audience over-analytical about the marketing campaign itself.

Trust for Higher-Placed Websites and Lower-Placed Website Surprisingly Balanced

According to the study, when looking to buy something, 54% of users on search engines trust websites ranked higher. 46% do not necessarily trust top-ranked websites more than others.

The surprising thing here is the gap not being wider. While looking to buy something, there is a large portion of users who may trust lower ranked websites on SERPs as well. This is good news for SEOs looking to gain as much traffic as they can from search engines and onto their product page.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, this article covers three key takeaways from Brand Verity’s Consumer Trend Study.

About the Author – Ramkant Singh is a content developer with a number of years of experience in the field. He currently writes guest posts for Eduburg, an institute known for its digital marketing course in Delhi.