People Are Strange

I’m only a week and a half into my life as an I-COM employee and I think it’s fair to say I’ve already easily doubled my knowledge of SEO.

I came to the company on the back of a year and a bit of writing optimised news feeds and general copy for a wide variety of websites. It was basically covert marketing, writing keyword-heavy news stories about specific products, services or subjects to help boost clients’ rankings in SERPs.

However, the technical side of the operation was taken care of by a separate team of people, leaving us lowly content producers with precious little knowledge of the SEO world. 

People Are Strange

Since starting at I-COM, Google AdWords has played a sizeable role in my attempts to bring myself up to speed with all things SEO.

I had a little look at it when researching keywords for a client ... and then quickly became addicted to it. That’s because I found it really interesting to see just how strange individuals are when their fingers touch the keyboard.

According to a recent UN report, the number of people with an internet connection around the world is expected to hit 2 billion by the end of the year. But just because the web is ubiquitous, it doesn’t necessarily mean this multitude of people actually know what they’re doing when they use it.

I quickly became interested in how people seem to search for general or blanket terms when they are, presumably, looking for a specific service or piece of information.

For example, the number of global monthly searches for “music” is currently 1.22 million – and that’s people searching for the exact word alone, rather than all the search terms that contain it.

Millions of People Disregarding Logic

Who on earth would just search for “music” and expect exactly what they’re looking for to flash onto the screen in a split second? Do they want to buy a CD? Stream music? Download a song? Learn about the history of music? Read album reviews? What?!

Additionally, “sport” is searched for approximately 4 million times a month around the world, and “jobs” 1 million times.

Surely searchers know the state of the internet today requires you to be at least a tiny bit more specific? Apparently not.

Basically, I’m glad I’ve learned so early on in my time at I-COM that millions of searchers appear to completely disregard logic when looking for information.

From now on, I will no longer underestimate how strange people are, and hopefully this new approach will yield some positive results in my future work here!