Majority Of Search Results Invisible, Users used to quality results Options

[Ruud]

Searchers prefer organic results:

Nearly seven out of 10 respondents said they clicked a search result within the first page of results, and 92% clicked a result within the first three pages of search results.

More search engine users surveyed clicked the first page in 2008 (68%) than did so in 2006 (62%).

At the same time, fewer search engine users surveyed were willing to click results past the third page in 2008 (8%) compared with 2002 (19%).

The article goes on to point out how this means big dollars for SEO as the payback is so good.

It's "funny" but years later we're basically back to AOL's keywords for navigating. Only now the keyword has just a few more options attached to it.

If anything this shows two things; the need for efficient (specialized) long tail models -- and the need to focus on non-search traffic.

[bwelford]

Thanks for surfacing that, Ruud. Most heartening.

My current enthusiasm is about the snippets that Google creates and how that gets searchers to click on your entry rather than other higher ranking entries. I think there's lots of leverage around that concept.

[EGOL]

This was an interesting article. Thank you Ruud.

Google has added a lot of enhancements to their SERPs in the past couple of years that probably makes more people click on first page results. Above the organic SERPs they might have "product results" "image results" "news results"..... they might insert something else at position #3. At the bottom of many results pages they have "Searches related to". Today if you don't make the first page of SERPs you are not getting much traffic.

Also, I agree that we need to do more to "elicit the click".

Here are two ideas. I'd like to hear others if anyone has them..

* If you have a killer price, put it in the title tag. We rank below the publisher but sell for about 20% less than they do. So we put the price in our title tag and I bet that we snipe lots of their sales.

* We experimented with enticing words... for example... which of these title tags will elicit more clicks? Words like "secrets" can pull a lot more clicks.
- Finding Bargains in New York City
- Secrets to Finding Bargains in New York City

[Autocrat]

The stats are nice... and probably quite accurate for mainstream usage - but I wonder how they compare against more specific/obscure things.

Lookup for certain searches (such as scripts etc.), and the first couple of pages are pure rubbish (thats in the big 3 as well)... all showing the same sort of entry but listed on multiple directory sites.
You have to go in more than 2 or 3 pages deep to get anything close to being usable.

So I think it will depend on the searchers and the searched for in some (yes, mostly small/rare) cases.
But still, on the more general side of things... it is pretty handy to know.

[yannis]

Some very good points you raise Ruud. I was intrigued by your statement:

If anything this shows two things; the need for efficient (specialized) long tail models

Any ideas here? A lot of my traffic on some of my websites comes mostly from very long query phrases and mostly long tail. Also from my observations SEO for long tail terms comes mostly from on page factors rather than link building.

Have you got any more ideas how to optimize for this?


Yannis

This post has been edited by yannis: Apr 20 2008, 11:14 AM