Laptops have become an increasingly popular and necessary Back to School item, so we used the generic term ‘laptops’ to help understand the current search strategies and behavior around this competitive term. Many consumers put significant time and consideration into researching a laptop before committing to the purchase, since computers and electronics tend to have a longer life span and higher price tag.
In order to help understand what searchers are looking for during the purchasing cycle, we looked at the Search Term Sequence Summary report for ‘laptops’, a new tool to be released soon in Hitwise. The search terms used in queries before ‘laptops’ are an interesting lot, many include brands of computer manufacturers or retailers, along with price-sensitive qualifying terms like ‘cheap’, ‘free’, and ‘discount’. However, an interesting trend emerges following a search on ‘laptops’, where retail names seem to dominate. In some cases, there are also manufacturer names like Apple, Dell, HP and Sony, but each of these sells direct as well. These search queries suggest that shoppers may have a brand in mind to research initially, widen the search to include others (just to be sure), and then head to a retailer.

Knowing what people are searching for is half the battle and needs to be followed by understanding and improving your position with the search engines. Here we’ll focus on organic search results which take more time to create results, but could help drive sales in the upcoming holiday season.
Below are the results of searches on ‘laptops’ – the overall share of organic clicks for the search term ‘laptops’ and position in organic ranking across the 3 major search engines for last week from our new SERPs tool. Together, Best Buy and Dell captured 33% of all organic clicks from searches on ‘laptops’ for the week ending August 7, 2010 and hold high positions in organic listings on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Best Buy captured the highest share of organic clicks for searches on ‘laptops’ last week and ranked 1st in Google’s organic SERPs, 6th on Yahoo! and 9th on Bing. Dell followed with 10% of all organic clicks on ‘laptops’ and ranked 2nd in Google organic SERPs, 1st on Yahoo! and 2nd on Bing. While the position on Google is always going to be important, this is also a good way to discover additional opportunities with Yahoo! and Bing.

Also important is the landing pages appearing in the SERPs to understand where the searcher is potentially being sent following the search to compare the types of offerings being made by competitors.