Search Engine User Attitudes

"An important takeaway for search marketers from this survey is that it's increasingly important to think of your target audience not as 'searchers' or 'prospects' but rather as multi-dimensional users with complex needs and desires. An effective search marketing strategy now must go beyond simply optimizing for a particular engine, or bidding for a narrow range of keywords specific to your product or service.
Rather, it's important to build up a profile (or multiple profiles) of the type of people you're interested in attracting to your web site through search marketing. Build optimizing strategies and campaigns around those profiles, and the iProspect survey results suggest you'll be far more effective than using the one size fits all approach that many search marketers still employ today"

A different survey of searcher attitudes phrased things slightly differently, but again, emphasizes the importance of having good content on your site. Simply getting ranked on keywords won't get the job done if you don't have content of interest on the pages that the searchers find.