When you can understand how your consumers think before they have begun searching, you can enter into their minds. You will have a greater understanding of what drives them, what they like and how they formulate their thoughts in order to get what they want. Faced with increasing demand to change, search engine results are finally obeying the new ways customers search. Consumer search trends are going to become more complex in 2020 and beyond. Keywords and keyphrases are still important, but businesses will be faced with the demand to include more conjoined information. Consumers want more detail, they don’t feel the need to take shortcuts anymore due to voice search becoming incredibly popular. If you are not ready for these following changes, you will be playing catch-up for the rest of the decade.
Locality is important
Consumers have the world at their feet. And yet, more and more searches are including the words ‘near me’. Consumers want to become more connected with their neighborhood and city. They can have anything they want from anywhere in the world, but technology is having the opposite effect experts thought it would. Instead of going international in searches, consumers want to know what the best business and or service is, close by. Personal searches are, therefore, highly likely to include the desire to be locally serviced. Including your business on Google Maps, Facebook and review websites like Yelp is a top priority. Your business must have a fantastic digital shop window, with rating stars, reviews, exterior and interior images as well as contact details.
Cutting to the chase
Many customers will just be forthright with their search and ask for ‘the best’ business. This is why you need to encourage customers to leave reviews and rate your products and services. Using service rating companies like Feefo, you can add an element of trust in your search results. Consumers looking for the best of something will immediately go to the user reviews. A business with fewer reviews will be deemed less popular, even if you have a high rating. Thus it’s imperative you give customers a link to a product or service review page that validates their purchase and allows them to quickly share their experience.
Into the meme world
Consumers are entering into an incredibly interesting phase. They are become more tribal, for the lack of a better word. Online culture is staggeringly powerful when it comes to marketing and consumerism. One of the best examples is the PewDiePie gaming chair, which was purely marketed using a ‘meme’. These small subsets of particular cultures are proving to be undeniably a force to be reckoned with. That’s why you should use your social media accounts to incorporate memes and use the relevant wording to capture new customers that are searching for the memes that are trending.
Inherently, this means having a great marketing and social media awareness to first recognize when a meme is developing and who is pushing it, understanding what it means and the relevancy to your business and how you can weave your products and services, correctly into the movements. Google trend data does indicate that users are searching for things like ‘how to eat a burger’ and ‘all women are queens’. If you were a shampoo company, you would latch onto the latter meme. If you were a fast-food restaurant, you would utilize the former.
Multiple similar searches
Consumers are no longer using one kind of search style for their needs and want. It’s common for consumers to ‘window shop’ online. They will literally search many times, in different ways, for the same things, over a period of days and weeks, before making a purchase. This is because consumers have many choices and, they don’t feel the need to rush their shopping. Impulse buying is decreasing. Impulse buying is said to lead to depression because it often makes people feel conned of ‘missing out’ on something. Yet, with the added convenience that smartphone browsing has given to the world, consumers are taking their time and simply saving the items they are interested in on their wishlists.
Your business must utilize artificial intelligence to learn from the multiple searches consumers make. If someone is searching for a ‘bomber jacket’ the A.I. your website uses will pick it up via cookies. The consumer that landed on your website, may have searched for ‘red bomber jacket’ or ‘American style bomber’, or ‘bomber jacket for men’. Your A.I. will pick this up and decipher their search habits to present them with an accurate PPC ad that will show them what they have been looking for.
Creating content worth sharing
Consumers will search for content that is relevant to their buying needs. If a customer is in need of tea, they might search for ‘what tea is best with toast?’. If a customer is looking to buy a new pair of running trainers, they could search for ‘best trainers for wet weather’. You have only one defense against losing relevant customer traffic on your website and that’s to hire the best SEO company that can create content worth sharing. They will write posts that weave your products and services into the content. Your content will be shared on social media which will increase your ranking and reach a wider audience as one person with many followers can suddenly make your post explode and go viral.
The quality of the writing, descriptive sentences and proper structure will make consumers want to continue reading until the end. Keeping consumers on your page for just a minute longer will massively increase your chances of converting them to making a purchase. This is, however, if your content has all the relevant links. Off-site links to news authorities will also make your posts more trustworthy in the eyes of Google.
Consumers are declining to impulse buy as much as they once did. They are making multiple different searches of the same product or service they want before relying on user ratings to narrow down their choices. You could cut in between with fantastic content that makes your products relevant in the context of their search.
