Search engines have been the most popular thing among people when it comes to finding information that’s high quality as well as provides value. We learned about search engine basics in this blog, where we got to know how search engines work.
Google has always topped when it comes to people’s preferences for search engines. It provides great value as well as having the largest share in the market. It uses various algorithms to rank websites and give businesses the visibility they’re putting so much effort into.
In this blog, we’ll learn about how users can interact with search engines and how easily they can find things that are focused on a specific type as well as relevant to their search intent.
How User Interact with Search Engines
Google has created many ways for users to engage and search for their queries. In this blog, we’ll cover all of it and see how users interact with search engines.
Search Bar/ Search Query Box
Search bar or say, search query box is available on all the search engines.
In the search bar, the user enters their query or the topic they want information about. To get the information, they might enter a single term or a long phrase. They can also edit the query or delete and re-enter it.
If we talk about Google, Google has a feature where it provides an auto-complete function. There, the user is suggested with the most related terms to their actual query at the time of entering the term in the search bar.
Most people skip or ignore this fact but, the auto-complete feature acts as a powerful keyword research tool.
Vertical Navigation
After you’ve hit the search button, you’ll see a vertical section just below the search bar.
That vertical section enables the user to access different forms of content as per their choice. The forms of content include images, news, video, maps etc. This helps the user get better and more sed results.
Metadata
Metadata plays the role of giving the user an idea of what a page holds. In a literal manner, metadata tells the user what to expect before they click on a website. It includes the titles, tags and descriptions to understand what the content is about and then gives the preview to the user.
Results Information
Just like metadata provides the information of a webpage as a preview, the result information enables it to estimate the number of relevant search results of a user’s query. It appears just before the search results and gives information about the number of search results and how much time it took to load the results.
Query Refinement Suggestions
Whenever you search on a search engine and scroll to the bottom, you will come across a section called “People Also Search for”.
This section suggests the user with more related searches that people do to make the user’s query more specific and targeted. Through this, search engines can produce more relevant search results to satisfy the customer.
Organic Results
One would’ve heard of organic results a lot when reading about SEO or brand visibility-boosting strategies. Organic results are the results of a query that came without any paid promotion of any brand or company.
Simply, when a website appears on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) even when they have not paid for the visits or clicks or to be advertised, it’s called organic results. It’s an unpaid service that provides relevant results and information.
If you’re a website owner, you should aim to implement SEO on your website to boost organic reach and rank your website in organic search results.
PPC (Paid Ads)
There are many factors on which search engines depend to provide search results. Search engines like Google rank websites according to their relevance with the user query and the bid amount a website owner offers. PPC is just another name for paid advertising on search engines.
Most of the PPC ads appear on the top of the search results with the term “sponsored”. Some websites may also appear at the bottom of the Search Engine Result Pages. One can differentiate them from the organic results by observing the same term i.e., “sponsored”.
In PPC ads, one should understand that business owners or website owners buy the visits of the user on their website to gain quick visibility and traffic on their website.
Conclusion
In this blog, we discussed about the ways a user engages with the search engines. With that, search engines like Google have made it much easier for people to search and get the results they’re expecting. They can find it in any form they want like images, news, videos etc.
Within the search bar suggestion and query refinement suggestion, both the user and the website owners can get benefits of refined searches and keywords search respectively. One can also get the previews as well as results information for more ease.
Google has introduced organic searches as well as PPC, that is, paid ads for the convenience of both the users and the websites who are looking to gain and provide value respectively.
The website owners focus on either the organic search results or the PPC, but here’s a tip – when both of them go hand in hand, you can gain the most benefit from these services.
