What Are People Searching For and Why Does It Matter for Your Listings?

If you've ever wondered what people are looking for when they Google something related to your business, the answer might be more complicated than you thought: as we'll explore from an analysis across 4000 listings locations and over 17M searches, customer queries lengths are becoming longer and more descriptive in a post-Covid environment as people seek information with a higher degree of specificity.

With the increase in word count, queries are including multiple core fields more often — which we will explore in greater detail below.*

*This research was conducted on a random sample of 4000 Yext domestic and international customer locations. Core fields refer to the standard set of properties that form the Listing's product such as address, hours of operation, etc.

Let's double-click on query length. One explanation for increasing query lengths could be due to increasing specificity of a user's search. This includes a wide range of factors, but we can simplify this observation by introducing a set of assumptions and bucketing keywords into categorical sets.

For example, a zip code is a location whereas common keywords such as 'open' or 'hours' are temporal or time based keywords. Common words that describe a brand or product such as 'best', 'top', or 'great' are included in a unique category as well.

When we apply this mapping technique and group common keywords or phrases into classes like proximity, location, temporal (such as hours of operation), phone, website, or descriptive business adjectives, new patterns emerge. We can better understand what is driving descriptive queries and, thus, prioritize relevant information to surface to customers.

For example, proximity related queries such as 'near me', 'around', 'in', 'closeby' or 'by' when grouped are growing quickly and are the most frequently used keywords in phrases, suggesting that convenience or accessibility is an increasing customer preference.

*The custom mapping logic used for this analysis is subjective and limited in scope based on common keywords. Keywords are bucketed based on their respective categories and are subject to interpretation.

Unsurprisingly, location or addresses play an important role in user query preferences. Location-related keywords such as Street, Road, Avenue, or the inclusion of Zip Codes appear as the second most prominent category.

So, why is this significant?

Multiple unique categories are being joined together in a single query. That's big. Customers are not only interested in the proximity of a good or service, but the proximity of that business and the hours of operation. Or, proximity, address, and some type of adjective that describes the business. The frequency of this behavior is growing. The longer the query, the more likely it contains a core field or multiple core fields.

At Yext, core fields are a basic set of field properties that showcases a Listing's address, business description, hours of operation, website, or phone number — very similar to the categories used for this research. These fields are on display across Google so that your Listing can appear prominently. Yext helps businesses manage these properties to ensure accuracy and consistency across multiple business locations.

Amongst queries that contain multiple core fields, we notice that keywords that reference proximity and hours are the most common set of core fields.

Preferences change. Consumers' move to longer queries thus reinforces the importance for businesses to be able to dynamically adapt to market changes where, in a brief period of time, consumers can change the specificity of their preferences.

The good news is that there are steps on the Yext platform that you can take today to capture these changes.

1. Make sure to fully fill out your business information with accurate data. Google says the most complete and accurate business profiles are easier to match with the right searches.* Yext allows you to sync the most amount of structured data to third party publishers than any other listings vendor.

2. Schedule business updates ahead of time, especially for the holidays when normal operating hours are likely to change. Check out the Scheduled Updates section in our Hitchhiker community to learn more about scheduling updates in Yext and the most common use cases for them.

3. Lastly, incorporate Google's latest keyword analytics into your search optimization strategy. By analyzing the top keyword searches that consumers use to find your business, you can identify trends that can help you optimize your performance in search.

By doing this, you ensure that core fields associated with your brand are up-to-date, accurate, and capable of dynamically delivering the necessary information that consumers are increasingly looking for related to your brand.

*Google