Why Search Is More Important Than Social (For Now)

I sometimes forget to include basics about search in a lot of my documentation. I have to remember to add it back in later. I figure after years of babbling about the difference it makes, and showing people the traffic increases, I might not have to go back to the basic business case. But this is foolish, because whenever I have to explain the anatomy of a search page and clarify paid vs. organic search, I’d better back it up with the reason the listener should even care.

For any company, you should care because more than 15 billion searches are performed every month – just in the US. You should care because 80% of web visitors start with a search engine in their browser. You should care because Google is always the top web site globally.

For Autodesk, the reasons are the significant percentage of global traffic that arrives through search. Tons of users looking for tasks, not just brand – the long tail for SEO counts for millions of keywords and millions of visitors. As much as I love social, these types of numbers make a difference: