Today's blog post provides a breakdown of “search” and how it impacts the visibility of your .au website. We look at how we can learn from search queries, the importance of understanding how results, rankings and page speed can affect your website and ideas on how this can be improved.

Learning from queries

Let’s say you want to find out more about caring for succulents, so you type “how to care for succulents” into the search box into your preferred search engine. This is your search query; simple, right?

Query insights are incredibly useful for businesses who want to find out what their customers/potential customers are looking for. Tools like Google Search Console allow website owners to dig deeper to find out what queries that they are ranking for, the volume of impressions and the number of people who are clicking on a search result generated from a particular search query.

Search queries become slightly more complicated when you begin to look into a user's search intent, which allows for a closer look at what the user is trying to find out. Types of intent include:

• Informational (user is looking for information);
• navigational (user is looking for a specific website);
• transactional (user is intending to purchase); or 
• commercial investigation (user is seeking to make a purchase, but looking for more information so that they can make an informed decision). 

By researching search queries, you can make changes to your website to improve your offer or query ranking, as discussed further below.

Results and rankings

Search results refer to how a search engine lists/ranks the information pertaining to a particular query, also referred to as Search Engine Results Page/s, or SERPs. SEO experts at ahrefs explain how SERPs work, including ways to get listed in the SERPs through paid ads (Pay Per Click/Adwords), organic search (SEO) and SERP features, which are results pulled from Google’s Knowledge Graph. For those who aren’t familiar, Google’s Knowledge Graph displays information generated from a series of interrelated pages and influences search and SEO by allowing for more brand visibility and authority.

The importance of page speed

One of the many factors search engines use to rank websites is how long it takes the content on a website’s page/s to load, which is known as “page speed”. For suggestions on how to improve your website’s page speed, you can conduct an analysis using Google’s PageSpeed tool, which provides actionable insights that can be implemented right away for website owners who have a strong technical capability.

There are many resources available to help you get started with search, and by dedicating some time to better understanding how it works, your website visibility can be improved significantly. Whether success is measured against sales, signups, page visits or file downloads, search is a powerful tool in influencing your conversion rate and what business doesn’t want that? 

Have some feedback, a question or idea for a future blog post? Email us today at blog@afilias.com.au