Google Search History Unpacked: 5 Spooky Recent Searches

Is there anything spookier than showing your search history to the world? In honor of Halloween, some of your favorite Demandwell team members are sharing their most recent Google searches with you. We will be judging analyzing their queries using a variety of critical SEO metrics. You may find the results surprising. Let’s take a look!

SEO Consultant – Mitch Briggs

When we’re helping our customers research keywords, we’re often asked “what’s the difficulty of this keyword?” or “what’s the cost per click () of that keyword?” 

The reason we use it as a metric in this post is because it is important to understand why these metrics have been used to judge how likely you are to rank well for a keyword.

Keyword difficulty: Keyword difficulty is a measurement of how much effort it will take on your part to get your content to rank on the first search engine results page (SERP). Keyword difficulty depends on factors like search intent, the number of competitors also ranking for the keyword, and the quality of those competitors’ content.

CPC: One way to get your content in front of search engine users is to target a certain keyword with pay-per-click ads. CPC is the price you’ll pay each time someone searches your target keyword and clicks on your ad. Marketers may use CPC as a proxy for estimating how much competition exists for a keyword and how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword.

Before you factor these metrics into your own keyword strategy, try to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. If the keyword is relevant to your audience and to the problem you solve, then pursuing it is still worthwhile even if it’s difficult to rank for.

Your goal shouldn’t necessarily be to find the easiest or least expensive keywords — it should be to target the topics that are most relevant to your audience. If a keyword is exceptionally valuable to your organization, you have to pursue it from a content relevancy standpoint even though it will be challenging to rank for.

Co-founder, CTO – Sam Smith

We have some questions for Sam as to why he searched “are there any laws in Las Vegas” but more importantly, there is a lot we can learn from Sam’s recent searches. 

You may notice that he had a variety of different intent signals for his searches. Keyword intent is an important component of keyword research. Understanding intent is critically important in your SEO content creation strategy. 

There are four primary types of intent that you need to consider when doing keyword research. Each serves a purpose for individuals moving through your marketing funnel, so ensure that your team is creating content for each intent signal. 

Transactional: This is the highest intent signal. Transactional intent signifies the searchers intention to take action. The searcher is most likely to commit to a purchase as a result of these types of searches. 

Commercial: Commercial intent lies in the space between “transactional” and “informational” (see below). Consider “commercial” intent one step closer to buying than “informational” intent, but the searcher may need some convincing before following through on the purchase. This is your opportunity to create content that really digs in on why they need your product or service. This is an excellent opportunity to showcase case studies, customer testimonials, etc.  

Informational: This signifies that the searcher is learning more, or is in the “research” phase of the buyer’s journey. Queries with informational intent typically start with: “how to…”, “why…”, “when should…”, “best way to..” etc. The best type of content to serve up for these queries are, you guessed it, informational pieces that simply serve to teach the individual about a certain topic as opposed to trying to sell them. 

Navigational: This intent signal simply serves to get the searcher to a very specific site. These queries typically contain a branded keyword (i.e. “Target” or “Amazon”). If an individual is searching for your brand name, they know exactly what they want. 

As you are going through your keyword research exercise, ensure that you are crafting content for each of the intent signals so that you can create a well-rounded SEO strategy.

Director of Marketing – Shauntle Barley

You may notice that Shauntle delineated “knitting needle sizes US”. You may also notice that when we are breaking down the volume for each keyword, we have specified that it is specifically the volume in the USA. If you are predominantly focused on the U.S. market, there is a distinctly different strategy than you would need to implement than if you were to focus on the Brazilian market or the Italian market, and so on and so forth. 

Expanding your reach to the global market requires necessary shifts and changes in your site infrastructure, keyword strategy, and SEO content development strategy. You can check out what Demandwell does for international search here. 

Eric Sears

Eric’s search history, combined with his passion for golf, tees up the perfect opportunity for one of our favorite SEO jokes…

Why did Tiger Woods start studying SEO?

To get his #1 ranking back.

Lucky for you, you don’t need Tiger Woods’ backswing to rank #1 on Google. There are three primary factors that impact your ability to rank: infrastructure, content, and endorsements. 

In order for your domain to hit Google’s radar, the algorithm must ascertain that your site is well-built, free of malware or bugs, and easy to access. When creating content, you cannot simply publish one keyword-heavy blog post and expect to rank. You must create a variety of keyword-heavy posts with proper formatting in order to up your chances of ranking. And finally, you must focus your time, energy, and attention on endorsements – AKA backlinks. Basically, if a 3rd party website has a link leading from their website back to yours, then that can act as a positive endorsement for your content. The logic is simple, if other people are trusting and referencing the information you’re sharing, it must be helpful and accurate. 

CEO, Co-founder – Mitch Causey

Leave it to our fearless leader to take us on an absolute roller coaster with his search history. 

Wrapping up!

Regardless of what your users are searching for, the Demandwell Content Production Suite can help you in two important ways. First, it helps you identify the most important keywords to go after. Second, it gives you the workflow optimization software to execute on that term and dominate the SERPs. 

As we’ve seen today, people use google to answer questions, solve problems, find things to buy, or realize they regret past purchases…it turns out lupini beans are incredibly bitter.