Last week it was reported that the use of search engines was growing. One of the suggested reasons for this was that with the increase in search engine power, more users were performing navigational/branded searches rather than utilising bookmarks or directly entering the URL. The latest figures from Hitwise appear to corroborate this claim.A navigational or branded search is one where the user's searches for the company name rather than the service they offer, for example searching for 'bigmouthmedia' rather than 'search engine optimisation'. In a recent report Hitwise have shown that in the UK 88% of the top 2,000 searches were navigational in nature, an increase on 2007's figure of 81% and 74% in 2006.
The report also shows the high volume of searches for social websites in the UK Facebook, Bebo, YouTube and MySpace make up 5 of the top ten most searched brand terms. The other brands include 3 retail sites, eBay, Argos and Amazon, with 'bbc' and 'bbc weather' filling the remaining positions
When only paid results are observed the only social website left in the top ten is YouTube (again taking up two positions with both 'youtube' and 'you tube') as more retail based sites take the positions. This is in part due to Google allowing for the bidding on trademarked terms for paid results as retailers move to protect their brand.
This increase in navigational searches highlights how important it is to rank well for your own brand terms - as it seems that that's the way people seem keen to search.
