It’s become a commonplace to say that you have to think like a consumer to do search marketing well. But a new study of the way average searchers read search results pages suggests that savvy marketers should also try to see like their target consumers, too.
Search engine marketing firms Enquiro Search Solutions and Did-It teamed up with eyetracking survey firm Eyetools early this year to examine how 48 subjects looked at search results on one specific engine: in this case the most widely used one, Google. The findings from that survey, previewed last March and released fully in a white paper published in July, indicate that conventional wisdom is right about the vital importance of appearing in the top ranks in natural search—at least the first time someone visits a search results page.
Gordon Hotchkiss, president and CEO of British Columbia-based Enquiro, says the subjects were given five test search scenarios, some open-ended and others with specific goals for their research. The searchers’ eye movements were measured and recorded to determine how they progressed around the landscape of the search page. Researchers made a distinction between “fixations”, points where searchers’ eyes stopped for a moment, and “scanning”, where subjects engaged in active reading of the text, however briefly. Finally, their eye motions were correlated with click activity, to see how what they looked at affected what they acted upon.
The researchers found that users’ fixation eye movements described what Hotchkiss calls a “golden triangle” on first visits to a Google results page. Their eyes almost uniformly moved from left to right most of the way across the top natural search result, then skipped down to the next result and fixated a bit less, then even less on the ensuing results. The effect created a triangular area of awareness in the upper left corner of the results page extending down to the “fold”, the bottom of the first search screen on a standard 1024 x 768 computer monitor. Very little eye activity went below that fold, which usually included results numbers 5 to 10.
Google offers both a “Top Sponsored” position for paid ads and a OneBox listing for results from specialized sources such as news outlets, both appearing above the first natural search result. Among first visitors to a results page, the study found that about 43% first moved their eyes to the Top Sponsored listing, while 14.6% first fixated on OneBox listings where these were offered. But almost 39% had their first fixation on the top organic result. By comparison, only 1% fixated first on the top paid ad on the “right rail” of the search page.
When it comes to more engaged “scanning” of the results, the tests showed that subjects’ eyes moved down the page in a kind of F-shaped pattern, looking horizontally at the title to a result and then, if that wasn’t relevant to the search, dropping down vertically and moving along the next title.
This means that title tags, which are important to optimizing a page for search engine indexing, are just as important to human readers, Hotchkiss says. “The title tag is the only thing readers have to determine if your site is relevant to their search,” he says. “So give them some meat to catch their attention. If you do, they will take time to read the description of the page.”
An interesting finding came out of studying the way people read those page descriptions. In one test scenario, searchers saw two very similar listings for a digital camera from the same Web site, one in the top organic position and one in the second. The pair had closely similar titles but slight differences in their page descriptions. Strangely, Hotchkiss says, the number two listing got a lot more scan activity that the first one. Superimposing the parts of the description clicked on also showed much more click activity for the second listing.
The answer, he says, lies in the fact that searchers may have many concepts in mind when they start looking for something on the Web. They are forced to distill that cloud of concepts down to a word or phrase to fit into the query box. “But that doesn’t mean they disregard all those other considerations in their search,” he says. “All those words are still going through our mind.” In the case of the digital camera, these may be phrases such as “easy to use,” “pocket-sized,” or “consumer reviews,” or even brand names and technical details such as “5 megapixel” and “Canon”. As we begin to scan listings, we have a semantic map in our head of these concepts beyond our specific search term; and we gravitate quickly to those listings that contain the largest number of our unspoken but real search conditions.
“So even if you’re in that ‘golden triangle’ spot on the search results page, you have to realize that position is not everything,” Hotchkiss says. “People are scanning those listings, looking for matches to their semantic map.” Effective search marketers will capitalize on this search behavior and think themselves into the minds of their searching customers, building as many of those attention-grabbing concepts and phrases as they can into their page descriptions. Prices, consumer reviews and comparisons, product details, trusted brand names and specific geographic references are all elements that can grab the active attention of a scanning searcher.
Hotchkiss admits that these findings need to be tested against behaviors on other search engines than Google and using larger test groups than 50 subjects. But he says the study is a strong start toward formulating a picture of actual search behavior by consumers, and the same team will continue to investigate other aspects of that behavior.
One area that may benefit from further study is a closer examination of the value of paid search ads along that right side of the results page. The first visits studied for this paper indicated that they received relatively little attention, but he says it may turn out that as searchers click back to a search results page to investigate further listings, those sponsored listings along the right rail may exert more pull.
“Search is such a ubiquitous activity now and becoming so much a part of our day-to-day life that we’re going to have to do more research,” he says. “We need to understand better how people interact with it.”