Over the years, search marketing has evolved as the searcher themselves have figured out just how to use search engines to get the information they are looking for. As a result there has been an increased move toward longer search terms as the evidence shows that the more people tell the engines about what they are looking for the better the result will be.

This philosophy has influenced search campaigns on both the organic and paid sides of ledger for years and appears to make perfect sense. Interestingly enough, some new data has been released that shows some increase in the use of one-word terms for search! Go figure. Small Business SEM’s Matt McGee has brought this to our attention and we figure it’s worth sharing.

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that searchers are typing longer queries into the search boxes on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The evidence I’ve seen in the analytics for the four hyperlocal blogs that my wife and I write support that: On our Richland Real Estate blog, for example, seven of the top 10 referring keywords in 2009 were four words or longer.

But the folks at Experian Hitwise have shared some numbers with me today that suggest otherwise. According to their user tracking, one-word searches jumped by 17% in 2009, while longer searches were generally down.

The chart below from Hitwise shows the data for this ‘trend’. We use the term ‘trend’ cautiously because there is no logical reason for this to suddenly happen.

One thing that has changed in the recent months how the major search engines Google, Yahoo and bing handle certain one-word searches. If you do a search for the term “doctor” you will get local map results sandwiched between the #4 and #5 organic search results. This is based on the IP address of the computer location that is conducting the search. If a local qualifier is used this map will appear at the top of the SERP’s (search engine results pages). Here is a search result for the single word term ‘doctor’ and you see how the map is incorporated in the SERP.

This result demonstrates two things:

1. You need to be on top of your local listings
2. You need to be on top of the changes in the search engines

So what are your thoughts on this one? Personally, I don’t think enough people are aware of the fact that one-word searches can still result in local options. Based on that fact, I am a little stumped at this data. Maybe people are getting more info from social media sources and don’t need search like they used to? It’s fine to speculate on this but as to a firm answer, I don’t know if there is one. If there was ever an area where logic and reason sometimes take a back seat to a “WTF?” result it’s search marketing. It’s what keeps it fun.

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