Most business owners get excited when the see their site reach the first page of a search engine. As a matter of fact, I have heard hundreds of them brag about it, “Im on the first page of Google”. This excitement is what fuels the dishonest side of search engine optimization business. Dishonest people and companies alike, pay someone to get a clients websie to the very least favoarable position on page #1 and 9 times out of 10 the client is happy. He’s happy because he doesn’t know the difference between positiion 8 and positon 2.

With Eye Tracking Software, we get exact data of where we need our websites to rank to get the most traffic. Below is heat map of where the eye goes when a SERP page is loaded.

As you can see, the trend is moving upward on the SERP page. That’s due in large part to search engine technology and algorithms being able to deliver the most qualified sites in your search, and the majority of web surfers trusting the search engine their using. If this trend continues, by the end of 2011 there won’t be any green below position #3. That means that position 1-3 will get nearly 100 of the clicks and views, with positon #1 receiving the lion share of them.

Below is a study that will leave you with a crystal clear understand of click patterns, views and time on a website.

Eye Tracking Studies

The objective of eye tracking studies is gaining insight into how users browse the presented abstracts and select links to click. The results of eye tracking research provide Internet marketers with information on clickthrough rates, thus allowing them to make correct predictions on traffic changes as their rankings are gained or lost. For SE engineers the results provide a basis for improving the interfaces of search engines and metrics to evaluate the relevancy of the presented search results.
To detect users’ interaction patterns the eye tracking experiment observes a number of indicators of ocular behavior using a CCD (charged couple device) camera similar to the appliance used to read bar codes. The indices of ocular behavior include eye fixations, saccades, scan paths and pupil dilation. Eye fixations are defined as a stable gaze lasting for 200-300 milliseconds representing visual attention to a specific area of a SERP. Pupil dilations or pupil diameter changes represent a measurement of interest in a particular listing. This variable is especially important as it helps interpreting an implicit user feedback to the relevancy of the presented search results.

Cornell University Eye-Tracking Analysis of SE Users’ Behavior

One of the most recent eye tracking studies was performed at Cornell University by Laura A. Granka, Thorsten Joachims and Geri Cay ([1]). They used a sample of undergraduate students instructed to perform search in Google for 397 queries o topics covering movies, travel, music, politics, local and trivia. This study has produced the following results.

Study Results: Clicks and Attention Distribution

As you can see from the graph below and a SERP  heat-map based on it, the first two listings capture over a half of the users  attention in terms of time of the eye fixation. Whereas the attention is shared almost equally, the difference in number of click between the first two listings is much more surprising: over four times! After the second listing the eye fixation drops sharply. Search results number 6 to 10 receive roughly equal attention. Here an interesting thing is that the 7th listing gets less attention than the succeeding 8th and apparently here we can observe the effect of the page fold. The 7th listing is just below the screen edge and is often skipped as users scroll the page down to the bottom (during the study the 7th listing was clicked only once). On the graph you can also see the 11th listing from the second page of the search results. It gets only about 1 percent of clicks and user attention is  2.5 times less than the lowest ranked result on the page one.

Often people consider getting to the  top ten of Google as a measurement of the SEO success. Evidently this is a rather rough approximation. The top ten itself is a very diverse group with the number of clicks increasing almost logarithmically as your rank grows. For instance, the first five positions get over 88% of the traffic, and the first three receive  79%.

SERP Browsing Patterns

Another important result of this study is the discovery of the browsing pattern: the way people read a SEPR. To assess the performance of the search algorithm it is vital to know how users evaluate the presented abstracts before clicking one of them. For example, if a user clicks the third listing, did he look the abstracts above and below it? The following figure shows how many results above and below of the selected listing are scanned on average.

The effect of the page fold is clearly demonstrated here as well. While the first 5 listings are clicked after browsing through 1 to 2.68 listings above and below, the 7th listing is clicked after the entire page is examined! The listings below the page fold (8-10) are clicked after the first five or four listings are scanned. You can also see that the number of listings scanned above the clicked result is much bigger than the number of listings below. This indicates that users browse the list from top to bottom.

To Sum It All Up

Simply being on the first page is not going to help you grow your business. You must have the mind-set that you want to completely dominate every page your on for maximum clicks and new patients.

When you have a gorgeous website that answers all your potential patients questions, allows them to contact you easily and is fun for them to browse through, you give them no reson to click on the next site down the SERPS. People don’t want to close your webpage and click the next one and start over, it’s work and time, and they would like nothing more than call you since they are already on your site. Our network does this for you.