I wrote two posts over the last day or so that describe interesting problems with search engines - in the first place I noted that People Search Less for what they’re not interested in. That's right - no matter how optimized you make your site and how well you do in search results - if people aren't that interested, and they aren't as interested in buying houses right now, then all the optimization in the world is not going to sell you more houses, or house plans, etc.
In fact, Hitwise was able to show something I was privately telling my clients for quite some time - getting the search results is just the first 25% of making a sale, or even less - it's what happens after a visitor arrives on the site that really matter - but in the case of things like "house plans" or "houses" there really is lower demand and there fore, traffic will go down on searches related to "houses" because it must go down - people don't want to eat a lot more food after they've just eaten - or, you can't sell house plans to people who are losing their homes, when there's over a years worth of new homes that can't be sold right now and are depreciationg in value.
Look, if you don't belive me, look at this chart (below)
Not sure if less searches led to lower prices on houses or the other way around - but you can see the two are co-related. I'll leave it at that.
Also, I wrote another post about Keyword Search sucks according to TechCrunch - and it does. So, people aren't looking because they can't afford to - and then, when they do look, the termonology doesn't match up well with teh content up there, on the web.
This was very much on my mind (esp the first post I mentioned); but I took a break from it and dropped off a painting of mine to a gallery in Brooklyn - here's a movie I made of my analytic impressions of the day:
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