Businesses and SEO Internet Marketing Consultants Need To Understand Today’s Intelligent Customer

A key question for all businesses is “how do consumers decide to buy a service?”. This has evolved and is continuing to change in today’s digital age. For thousands of years people relied on their families for advice and recommendations on who to use. Today, increasingly people are away from their support networks of families and friends, either in distance or in outlook. So they now rely heavily on digital advice, so if a company or brand is not there in the virtual world, they will not be chosen.

Today’s consumer is far more intelligent than in the past. They will collect information from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other major search engines. Finding informative sites that will supply information. They will only look on page 1 of the search engines, typically only 1-5% will move to page 2.

Increasingly they will check on their favourite Social Networking sites, they ask friends on Facebook, MySpace and for business related requirements, LinkedIn. Searching on these sites as well.

They are avid readers of consumer reviews, whether for booking restaurants or reviews on Amazon. The danger for any business is to have negative reviews or low average ratings. This is an issue as only a small number of people write reviews and these are often negative. Those that people are happy with, are less likely to write a review.
These are all areas that good Search Engine Optimisation SEO consultants will help you with.

These internet consumers are knowledgeable when researching on search engines. They understand which ones are adverts and are increasingly skeptical about these. After all, the companies paying, only have to pay, they do it because they are not professional and not on the front page for other reasons. They prefer the organic search results. They understand that the companies at the top of the listings are more likely to be professional companies that will meet their requirements.

The intelligent internet purchaser is time strapped, so they will choose on the basis of the following factors.

– Domain Name
– Title of web site
– Description
– Quality and Clarity of the web site

Doe the domain name reinforce the product or service, does it reinforce expertise in the product? The first line of a Google description and the description below, only have around seventy characters, so need to be carefully chosen to attract people to go to the website.

When they get to the website, if they are going to stay, you have eight seconds to convince them. Key information needs to load rapidly, it must show them what the page and website is about, otherwise they will press the “Back” button and look again.

If you guide an intelligent consumer to the end you have a profitable customer.

– Large cities like London are far more likely to be home to the intelligent consumer.
– They value quality solutions.
– The Intelligent consumer is affluent and less driven by cost.
– They are often thinking short term, just in time.
– The intelligent consumer is more likely to use digital sources for information, email and web rather than snail mail and papers.
– They are often far from their family and good friends, so have to rely on the web for keeping in contact and seeking advice and information.
– They are using the search engines to purchase, they do not have the time to go window shopping.

These are the types of consumers who all businesses want. Enjoy finding them.