Word up. Or two words. Or four.

NetImperative this week reported that a new survey by BigMouthMedia shows how consumers are wising up to search engine optimisation techniques.

According to the survey of users in Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, France and the Nordic region, users are now abandoning single word or brand searches in favour of more complex search terms.

Italian, British and German users were amongst the most web-savvy, consistently using four-word phrases to search for goods and services online.

All of this demonstrates a shift in the world of internet use, which in turn means a massive shift in the world of marketing and sales. Google’s corporate focus has shifted from finding what the consumer wants to finding what businesses want them to find, and sales-saturated consumers are wising up to methods of side-stepping this clumsy method.

The hey-day of quasi-SEO “experts” may be over, and not a minute too soon. One-word optimisation is simply not enough to catch consumers anymore, and the army of SEO hacks filling pages and pages with repetitive copy may find themselves a little out of their depth. Consumers are becoming shrewd navigators of the web, tired of their search page being flooded with sales material that is not relevant to their needs. So, they are ignoring the top of their list on when Google returns its results, and using increasingly sophisticated search terms to avoid trawling through irrelevant blurb.

When searching for relevant content, consumers need – and increasingly do – dig deep for the subject, industry, price and region of what they are searching for. With this in mind, internet marketing that rests on SEO will have to become a much more exact science.