Segmenting The Market

Segmenting The Market

Frank over at SEW also wrote about this article, on SEOMoz blog:

Segmenting Search Intent

Randy at SEOMoz is onto something, and it has me thinking about my website a little differently at the moment. Since I'm about to help my company launch a paid-search advertising captain to increase the amount of business we drive to clients. My thinking is, obviously, that we want to be showing up in those "transactional" searches as well as the "informational" ones, and that will influence how we buy keywords. But for Google/Yahoo/MSN, if that influences where they place ads on the page, then that is interesting. I would like to see some research on click patterns and with regard to search types. How do people treat an SERP obtained by an informational search, as opposed to one obtained by a transactional search? Do they scan the SERP differently based on their intent? Do transactional searches yield users who are more likely to scan the adds to the right, as opposed to informational searches? I would assume the answer is yes, but I wonder how stark the contrast would be.