Even before connecting your customer to your product, website or group online in terms of SEO it’s important to understand the customer search journey.
The first step in searching for something online for most customers starts at the browser. As of March 2015 the top 5 browsers for use on the internet are as follows:
Google Chrome: 49% Internet Explorer: 17% Firefox: 16% Safari: 10% Opera: 1%
In terms of actual search engine market share:
Google: 66% Bing: 10% Yahoo: 10% Baidu: 9% AOL: 1%
With it’s current domination of online search we will concentrate on Google Chrome and Google search. A very interesting stat that came out in may 2015 directly from google was that for the first time mobile search engine usage was higher than desktop search usage. Then, in June of this year, Google announced that it would give preference to a website’s search rankings for those sites that have adopted responsive, mobile friendly websites and would penalise, in ranking terms, those sites that are not adapted to our new mobile world.
The customer search journey:
- Customer wants to search for something online.
- They open their browser, likely to be chrome.
- By now most people will type their search query into the chrome browser window.
- Google will immediately, after one word start to make suggestions for their search.
- This is called Google Auto complete.
- By this stage, the search engine is starting to influence user search.
By this stage, your customer search journey should be made very clear so it’s now time to take a look at the the things people type into Google to get to your desired destination.
