How Search Engines Drive Commerce on the Web

People make use of search engines for a wide variety of purposes, with some of the most popular being to research, locate, and buy products. Ecommerce sales reported by the US Census Bureau were a healthy $47.5 billion (http://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.pdf) in the second quarter of 2011.

It is important to note that search and offline behavior have a heavy degree of interaction, with search playing a growing role in driving offline sales. A Google study from 2011 showed that each $1 of online ad spend drives anywhere from $4 to $15 in offline sales (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpay_ckRpIU).

According to a March 2010 report from Forrester Research, over $155 billion worth of consumer goods were purchased online in the US in 2009. While that seems like a big number, the influence on offline sales was far greater. Forrester estimated that $917 billion worth of retail sales in 2009 were “web-influenced.” Further, online and web-influenced offline sales combined accounted for 42% of total retail sales. Local search is an increasingly important component of SEO, and one that we will explore in detail in Chapter 2.

Get The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.