Hello everyone, yesterday Miss Ting Li spoke about Google search’s golden triangle. This research, focused on an eye tracking study, has shown that users look and click only in a specific area at the top of the result page, and they called this area “golden triangle”, because of its triangular form. It was conducted by eye tracking firm Eyetools and search marketing firms Enquiro and Didit with 50 people. Researchers discovered that users pay more attention on the first result, and gradually scrolling down on the page they have even less attention. Study has shown that users read the title and the entire description just for the first three results. When users scroll down the page, they tend to read only titles and then, towards the end of the page, not even that.
According to these studies, recently Google has done some changes to the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) decreasing the number of the results per page by ten to seven. That’s not all. They gave more visual space to the first result. For example, if you type “Apple” on Google, the first result has not only title and description, but now you can also see a lot of buttons that bring users directly to some subsection of Apple’s website (for example, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Support). Google explained that these changes were necessary to improve the quality and the speed of the users’ research because they want to convey their results prominently and quickly. In fact, some studies showed that slowness of the search engine’s response decrease users’ research number and engagement.
As you can understand it’s really important for a website to be in the first three results (five considering two sponsored links), because it allows websites to have more incoming traffic (First three results receive 100% of click). Furthermore, everything is in a visual dead zone, it doesn’t exist for users. However is not easy to access to the first results on the Google result page because they sell the first two results as a sponsored link to bidders who pay a lot of money to stay there. Use of strategic keywords and a good quality SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are the keys to be placed on the Golden Triangle without paying expensive fees. However, remember that the position in the SERP is dynamic and can change very often. If today a website is the first on the results page doesn’t mean that it will be the first tomorrow, because position depends by link, keyword and other action to drive more traffic into website.
Let’s see the attached video…
Claudio
References
http://eyetools.com/research_google_eyetracking_heatmap.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_(Internet_Marketing)
