What Is Search And How SEO Is Related To Search?
The blog is dedicated to the Bill Gate’s famous quote “the future of search is verbs”. Here verb stands for action. The search is important as it is the beginning of a consumer journey that concludes on people buying products or making other investments.
Let’s begin the consumer journey with search and understand how search evolved into a specific action
What people search?
There was a time when the online search was limited to find the documents that have the words typed in search boxes. But today people search with specific intents like to find answers to their problems; complete specific tasks or to do interesting things. Simply put, the search has become an action like booking a flight, downloading songs and browsing through pictures.
Today search starts with an objective that marketers call journey. It is part of a larger funnel where search starts with information and then graduates into decision making and then finally buying the product. The consumer journey is at the center of digital marketing and also in every form of marketing.
The evolution of consumer journey
Search is the start of consumer journey but today it has become complicated due to inclusion of many different devices like Smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops and even smart watches and Bluetooth devices. The search could start on mobile and end on desktop computer. In between it could travel from tablet to laptop.
The end user is free to choose his search tool like a phone and channel like search engine and social media. The journey continues for as long as the device used for search responds to the intent of the searcher. The bottom line of the search is that it has intent. It isn’t only about keywords but content or information.
The job of a marketer is to sense intent and serve content that fulfills the intent. Today search takes places at different levels and these levels could be many and even endless. Marketers can guide the searchers through their journey to the end products.
