Site-Searching Strategies of Searchers Referred from Search Engines

In this research, we analyze the referral queries and associated site-search queries at the session level from searchers coming from web search engines. Findings are based on a random sample of 10,000 from a total of 327,261 searching sessions of an online Spanish entertainment business collected over the course of a five month period from March 23, 2012 to August 26, 2012. We find six searching strategies that are correlated with the type of referral keywords (i.e., search terms) used at the major search engine. Of the six, the three major searching strategies are (1) the explorers who submit a broad query on the major search engine and then submit multiple broad queries on the site-search engine, (2) the navigators who submit a query to the major search engine that is part of a URL and then submit specific queries to the site-search engine, and (3) the persisters who submit the exact type of query on both the search engine and the site search. Implications for this research include developing better internal searching features, sponsored search keyword generation, and personalization of website content.