Search Engines

We generate a lot of our business from search engines so it was interesting to see a recent report that showed how people acutally look at a web page. By using special equipment that can track people's eye movements they used a Google search engine results page to see which parts of the page the eye was drawn to.

Not surprisingly the top left area of the screen had the greatest impact which meant in turn that the results shown on the page decreased in "visibility" according to where they were in the list.

• Rank 1 - 100%
• Rank 2 - 100%
• Rank 3 - 100%
• Rank 4 - 85%
• Rank 5 - 60%
• Rank 6 - 50%
• Rank 7 - 50%
• Rank 8 - 30%
• Rank 9 - 30%
• Rank 10 - 20%

Appearing at number 10 on a search result effectively elliminates 80% of searchers - which means we have plenty of work to do to keep ourselves at the top of the search engine listings.