More than half of Canadian search terms contain only one or two words. In the twelve weeks to 30th May 2009, 51.56% of Canadian search terms contained one or two words.
Hitwise recently launched Hitwise Canada and as a follow up to my blog post last week on the industries Canadians are visiting online (and the dominance of search), I wanted to get a better understanding of how Canadians search. In this first post in a two part series, I’ll just look at keyword length across markets. Later this week, I’ll publish some analysis on the content of the queries.
The following chart shows the keyword breakdown of search terms sending visits to websites in Canada, the US and the UK.

Notice that Canadians on average use fewer words in their search queries than Americans, but more than Brits.
Delving a bit deeper, we looked at search terms sending visits to a number of categories. Shopping and Classifieds websites broadly mirror the pattern for All Categories while search terms sending visits to Travel and to News and Media websites tend to be slightly longer. By contrast, 41.87% of search terms sending Canadian visits to Banks and Financial Institutions contained one word.
Marketers looking to fine tune search marketing strategies need an in-depth understanding of the search behaviour of consumers. We’ll follow up this post in the next few days with an entry on the types of search terms Canadians use to navigate the web. Stay tuned.