Public awareness and attitudes towards search engine optimization

ABSTRACT

This research focuses on what users know about search engine optimization (SEO) and how well they can identify results that have potentially been influenced by SEO. We conducted an online survey with a sample representative of the German online population (N = 2,012). We found that 43% of users assume a better ranking can be achieved without paying money to Google. This is in stark contrast to the possibility of influence through paid advertisements, which 79% of internet users are aware of. However, only 29.2% know how ads differ from organic results. The term ‘search engine optimization’ is known to 8.9% of users but 14.5% can correctly name at least one SEO tactic. Success in labelling results that can be influenced through SEO varies by search engine result page (SERP) complexity and devices: participants achieved higher success rates on SERPs with simple structures than on the more complex SERPs. SEO results were identified better on the small screen than on the large screen. 59.2% assumed that SEO has a (very) strong impact on rankings. SEO is more often perceived as positive (75.2%) than negative (68.4%). The insights from this study have implications for search engine providers, regulators, and information literacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Search engines
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• paid search marketing (PSM)
• online survey
• user studies
• searcher attitudes

Acknowledgments

The online survey was conducted by Fittkau & Maaß Consulting. Research data is available at OSF; https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JYV9R. A data note of the online survey is available at F1000 Research; https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.109662.1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.agof.de/en/

2 See research data, available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JYV9R, for details.

3 Please note that ‘SEO results’ in the following refers to all organic results, regardless of whether the corresponding websites actually perform SEO.

4 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/window-resizer/kkelicaakdanhinjdeammmilcgefonfh

5 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg

6 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/full-page-screen-capture/fdpohaocaechififmbbbbbknoalclacl

7 Note the method for calculating success rates, which includes the false positives (in the case of SEO results the markings of ads). On the large screen of the complex SERPs, eight shopping ads were displayed, and only two on the small screen. Thus, it was more difficult on the large screen to accurately identify SEO results because more ads were shown. The differences between the screen sizes in the marking of the SEO results on the complex SERPs are therefore probably also due to the different number of ads.

8 We could not assign 2% of the positive and 1% of the negative responses to a category since the statements were unclear.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; grant number 417552432).