[Build Backlinks Online] The Future of User Behavior - Whiteboard Friday

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Future of User Behavior -
Whiteboard Friday'


Posted by willcritchlow

In the early days of search, Google used only your typed query to find the
most relevant results. We're now increasingly seeing SERPs that are influenced
by all kinds of contextual information â the implicit queries.


In today's Whiteboard Friday, Will Critchlow covers what exactly that means
and how it might explain why we see "(not provided)" in our analytics more often
than we'd like.







WBF - Will Critchlow - The Future of User Behavior






PRO Tip: Learn more about how Google ranks pages at Moz Academy.


For reference, here's a still image of this week's whiteboard:





Video Transcription



Hi, Moz fans. I'm Will Critchlow, one of the founders of Distilled, and I
want to talk today about the future of user behavior, something that I've been
talking about a MozCon this year. In particular, I want to talk about the
implications of query enhancement. So I'm going to start by telling you what we
mean by this phrase.


Old-school query, key phrase, this is what we've talked about for a long
time. In SEO, something like "London tube stations," a bunch of words strung
together, that's the entire query, and we would call it a query or a key phrase.
But we've been defining this what we call the "new query" made up of two parts.
The explicit query here in blue is London tube stations, again, in this example,
exactly the same. What we're calling the "implicit query" is essentially all of
the other information that the search engine knows about you, and this what they
know about you in general, what they know about you at this specific moment in
time, and what they know about your recent history and any other factors they
want to factor in.


So, in this particular case, I've said this is an iPhone user, they're on
the street, they're in London. You can imagine how this information changes the
kind of thing that you might be looking for when you perform a query like this
or indeed any other.


This whole model is something that we've been kind of building out and
thinking about a lot this year. Tom Anthony, one of my colleagues in London,
presented this at a conference, and we've been working on it together. We came
up with this kind of visual representation of what we think is happening over
time. As people get used to this behavior, they see it in the search results,
and they adapt to the information that they're receiving back from the search
engine.


So old school search results where everybody's search result was exactly the
same, if they performed a particular query, no matter where in the world they
were, wherever in the country they were, whatever device they were on, whatever
time of day it was, whatever their recent history, everybody's was the same. In
other words, the only information that the search engine is taking into account
in this case is the old-style query, the explicit part.


Then, what we've seen is that there's gradually been this implicit query
information being added on top. You may not be able to see it from my brilliant
hand-drawn diagram here, but my intention is that these blue bars are the same
height out to here. So, at this point, there's all of the explicit query
information being passed over. In other words, I'm doing the same kind of search
I've always done. But Google is taking into account this extra, implicit
information about me, what it knows about me, what it knows about my device,
what it knows about my history and so forth. Therefore, Google has more
information here than they did previously. They can return better results.


That's kind of what we've been talking about for a long time, I think, this
evolution of better search results based on the additional information that the
search engines have about us. But what we're starting to see and what we're
certainly predicting is going to become more and more prevalent is that as the
implicit information that search engines have grows, and, in particular, as
their ability to use that information intelligently improves, then we're
actually going to see users start to give less explicit information over. In
other words, they're going to trust that the search engines are going to pull
out the implicit information that they need. So I can do a much shorter, simpler
query.


But what you see here is, again, to explain my hand-drawn diagram in case
it's not perfectly beautiful, the blue bars are declining here. In other words,
I'm sending less and less explicit information over as time goes along. But
actually, the total information that search engines have to work with, as time
goes on, is actually increasing, because the implicit information they're
gathering is growing faster than the explicit information is declining.


I can give you a concrete example of this. So I vividly remember giving a
talk about keyword research, and it was a few years ago. I was kind of mocking
that business owner. We've all met these business owners who want to rank for
the one-word key phrase. So I want to rank for restaurant or whatever. I say,
"This is ridiculous. What in the world can you imagine somebody is possibly
looking for when they do a search of 'restaurant.' "


Back then, if you did a search like that, you got a kind of weird mix,
because this is back in these days when there essentially no implicit
information being taken in. You've got a mix of the most powerful websites of
actual restaurants anywhere in your country plus some news, like a powerful page
on a big domain, those kinds of things. Probably a Wikipedia entry. Why would a
business owner want to rank for that stuff? That's going to convert horribly
poorly.


But my mind was changed powerfully when I caught myself. I was in Boston,
and I caught myself doing a search for "breakfast." I went to Google, typed in
"breakfast," hit Search. What was I thinking? What exactly was I hoping the
outcome was going to be here? Well, actually, I've trained myself to believe
that all of this other implicit information is going to be taken into account,
and, in fact, it was. So, instead of getting that old-style Wikipedia entry, a
news result, a couple of random restaurants from somewhere in the country, I got
a local pack, and I got some local Boston news articles on the top 10 places to
have breakfast in Boston. It was all customized to my exact location, so I got
some stuff that was really near me, and I found a great place to have breakfast
just around the corner from the hotel. So that worked.


I've actually noticed myself doing this more and more, and I imagine, given
obviously the industry I work in, I'm pretty much an early adopter here. But I
think we're going to see all users adopt this style of searching more and more,
and it's really going to change how we as marketers have to think, because it
doesn't mean that you need to go out there and rank for the generic keyword
"breakfast." But it does mean that you need to take into account all of the
possible ways that people might be searching for these things and the various
different ways that Google might piece together a useful search result when
somebody gives them such apparently unhelpful explicit information, in
particular, obviously, in this case, local.


I kind of mentioned "not provided" down here. This is my one, I guess, non-
conspiracy theory view of what could be going on with the whole not provided
thing, which is that actually, if Google's model is looking more and more like
this and less like this, and, in particular, as we get further over to this end,
and of course, you can consider something like Google Now would be the extreme
of this where is in fact no blue bar and pure orange, then actually the reliance
on keywords goes away. Maybe the not provided thing is actually more of a
strategic message for Google, kind of saying, "We're not necessarily thinking in
terms of keywords anymore. We're thinking in terms of your need at a given
moment in time."


So, anyway, I hope that's been a useful kind of rapid-fire run through over
what I think is going to happen as people get used to the power of query
enhancement. I'm Will Critchlow. Until next time, thanks.




Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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