A report released recently by Hitwise showed that Canadians engage differently with online search than their American cousins.
In Canada, it seems, Bing is the best search engine for producing successful searches. This, despite the fact that Bing is only the sixth-most popular search engine in the country.
Hitwise’s analysis of Canadian searches showed that Bing had a 78.6 percent success rate, compared to Yahoo, which had 74.4 percent, and Google which had an even lower rate of 72.1 percent.
The research company explains that a ‘successful search’ is “one where the consumer leaves the search engine after performing the search”. This definition is, certainly, open to plenty of scrutiny (who’s to say the user didn’t just leave the search engine because they were frustrated and fed up?). There’s also the possibility that they clicked on shortcuts, opened the link in a new page, etc.
It does seem, however, that Canadian search engines are enjoying a high success rate of searches. Hitwise reports that 70 percent of Canadian searches across all search engines in Canada were successful in the 12 weeks leading up to June 27, 2009.
Hitwise also revealed an interesting fact about Canadian search behavior. It seems that Canadian search queries were less complex than their American neighbors. In fact, more than half of all Canadian search terms contained only one or two keywords. However, the study also revealed the British searchers are even more keen on simple searches – with 60 percent of search queries from the UK containing only one or two keywords.
Hitwise’s Senior Online Analyst Heather Hopkins noted that Canadians seemed to have more search success if they included the word “Canada” in their searches (something which your Canadian reporter can attest to). For example, while a search for “walmart” only attained an 88.8 percent success rate, “walmart Canada” was 92.5 percent successful.
Despite the fact that Bing seems to be so successful with Canadian searches, Google retains the top spot as favored search engine, cornering a massive 80 percent of the Canadian search market.
Interestingly, the top non-navigational search on Canadian search engines was ‘games’ or ‘jeux’ (the French word for game) – it would seem that Canadians are very into their gaming.
Finally, it seems that it certainly pays to optimize your site for Canadian search engines – one-third of all website visits in June came from a search engine. Just make sure you have a .ca domain name: Canadians are quite nationalistic when it comes to online shopping.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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