Focus on the Sweet Spot: It does matter

The moral of today and of yesteryear is that web publishers and advertisers should concentrate on searches between three to six words long. The sweet spot for query length are four word queries. This result stands whether looking at the percentage of users clicking an advertisement, the number of total ads seen or the total clicks on ads.

This report, prepared by Chitika Inc., an online ad network, investigated a sample of impressions of search traffic between July 25th and July 31st. Digging into the raw numbers highlights that the queries which take the number one spot are shared by three and four word searches. Further research (available at request) demonstrates that searches with a length of three or four words see the similar number of advertisements and click through them at similar rates. Another recent Insights study indicated that queries less than 10 words are valued by advertisers; three to four words searches get over 40% of all advertisements on search engines, and account for 45% of clicks. Furthermore, the above graph indicates that searches between three and six words long have a .6% higher click through rate on their advertisements.

Clearly, the length of query entered into a search engine is highly indicative of the value of that traffic to advertisers. All in all, many professionals stress SEO optimization is as much a science as an art. We, at Chitika Inc, believe the science part of the argument is settled: stick to three to six word queries.