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Love at first search :   a qualitative study exploring generated attitudes towards listings in SERPs

Background: Search engine result pages (SERPs) act as an information channel between businesses and consumers. There is no way of denying search engines massive success in marketing for companies. SERP allows companies to be seen, communicate, and promote their products and services in an environment sorted by relevance for the consumer. The search engine is one way of building a solid brand online; therefore, it is crucial to investigate how to catch the user's attention and understand their attitudes in the first step of the decision-making process.  Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explore the generated attitudes towards the content that is displayed in each listing in the search engine result pages (SERPs).  Methodology: This research undertook an inductive qualitative approach with an exploratory research design. A pre-study with three cases was developed and eight semi-structured interviews were conducted. The eight participants were based on non-probability judgemental sampling. The respondents were equally diverse between men and women between the ages of 24-29.  Conclusion: This study concludes that the main explored positive attitudes that were generated towards the content of the listings in the SERPs were primarily the relevance of the search term throughout the listing, as well as brand familiarity. Other positive influences of favorable attitudes were short and concise but informative listings as well as displaying pictures. Furthermore, negative attitudes were found to be generated towards poor relevance and paid search in the listings, where organic results generated only positive attitudes towards it.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-113990
Date January 2022
CreatorsNilsson, Linnéa, Nordling, Dante
PublisherLinnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för marknadsföring (MF)
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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