JuliannaA recent report published by Hitwise, a company that specializes in measuring activity on the Internet, sheds light on the search behaviors and browser preferences of Canadians. Deeming a successful search as “one where the consumer leaves the search engine after performing the search,” Hitwise found that Canadians have a 70% success rate on search engine queries.
Other interesting findings include that Canadians typically favour less complex queries than our American neighbours with approximately half of us opting to use only one or two keywords. The report also noted that Canadians are more successful searching when they include the word “Canada” in their search; using Walmart as an example, the study notes the term “Walmart” attained an 88.8% success rate, while “walmart Canada” was 92.5% successful.
While Google is the favoured search engine of Canadians (no surprise there!) cornering 80% of the market, the study names Microsoft’s Bing as “the best search engine for producing successful searches.” According to the study, Bing had 78.6 percent success rate for Canadians, compared to Yahoo, which had 74.4 percent, and Google which had an even lower rate of 72.1 percent. Currently Bing is the sixth most popular search engine among Canadians.
If you do online business with Canadians, the study emphasizes the importance of optimizing your website for Canadian search engines as they are responsible for one-third of all website visits. It also recommends getting a .CA domain name stating that “Canadians are quite nationalistic when it comes to online shopping.”
Hmmm, I think I know someone who can help you with that .CA domain registration.
Read the article:
Canadian Online Search Behaviors Revealed, By Kaila Krayewski from www.isedb.com