Good day everyone! As of late my posts have been a bit tech heavy so I thought i'd give you some eye candy today.
If you've read any of my previous posts you may know, I once owned my own online marketing company which I sold to a larger firm in Green Bay Wisconsin. I then worked for the acquiring company for 6 years as their director of online marketing.
As part of a larger company, I now had access to resources I simply didn't have as a small 12 person firm. One of the best benefits was an ongoing training budget which I used to the full.
Probably my most memorable event was the opportunity to go to California back in 2006 for the Search Engine Strategies conference. I even got to visit the Google campus. Way cool! (I was particularly impressed with the corn dogs in the lunch room, they were HUGE!)
The Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference was the GoTo conference for Online Marketers, it was - and is - the best place to stay current with online marketing technologies, to learn, meet vendors, etc.
During the SES conference that year, the big buzz was all about the first Eye Tracking study that had been released by a company by the name of Enquiro. PPC was still in it's infancy, everyone was still focused on SEO or "Organic" listings, so Search Rankings were extremely important.
Of course we all knew that being at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) was extremely important, but Enquiro was the first company to really show empirical proof of that with such a visual impact. They coined the phrase "Google's Golden Triangle".
In a nutshell, what they did was to task a very large group of individuals to perform thousands of searches in front of computers which had been modified with eye tracking technology. Essentially, as users ran various searches - some planned, some free-form - the eye tracking equipment mapped where their eyes tracked across the page. This data was then compiled into what we've come to know as a heat map.
The image you're seeing below shows all of that data aggregated into a 1 page heat map but it represents thousands of searches. The pattern is unmistakable and has come to be known as "Google's Golden Triangle". If your listing was in the triangle it was golden because you were getting the highest visibility, thus (presumably) more traffic and more sales.
What is Google’s Golden Triangle?
The Golden Triangle is a distinct area of intense eye scan activity that is shown in the diagram below. It’s important to understand that the Golden Triangle pattern is seen in first time visits to a results page. I find it easiest to think of it as a storm map. The darker the area (Red) the higher the eye traffic.
The red lines below the triangle indicated various screen resolutions. Remember this was well before mobile and responsive web technologies had become mainstream. The larger your monitor the more listings you could see "Above The Scroll".
The purple "X's" are where users clicked in relationship to where they viewed. You can see that the vast majority of clicks occurred at the top left in the Hot Zone, then trailed off significantly as users moved into the cooler sections further down the page.
Now keep in mind, this was a life time ago in Internet terms, Google SERPS look entirely different today but it's still information worth knowing. Since then, millions have been spent by others including large online retailers who applied this same tech to their own sites.
The same eye tracking study also indicated that the number of people who examined page 1 results was about 100% as you'd expect. That number fell off to 17% for page 2 and 4% for page 3 (The study assumed at that time that the typical google user had their browser set at the default 10 results per page).
Long story short, if you weren't on page 1, you were missing as much as 83% of potential traffic. Even if you were on page 1, you really needed to be in the Golden Triangle to take full advantage of Google Traffic.
This is when I REALLY got interested in SEO and within a year I completed by Google Certification. Since then, I've acquired thousands of page one listings for clients all across the US.
Alas, I feel that SEO is gasping it's last breath. (I can't believe i'm saying this...) Remember Google doesn't make a penny from your SEO/Organic Listings, nor do they offer any type of performance guarantee for non-paid listings. They're not Evil, but they are a for profit company... follow the money.
So think hard about your online marketing. What is Google going to look like 3, 6, 12 months from now? Your organic rankings are already pushed below the scroll in most cases by top of page PPC ads, map boxes, and other content. Getting into the Golden Triangle these days is nearly impossible unless you've got VERY deep pockets.
What damage will be caused by the next algorithm update? If your livelihood is based upon Google rankings, you should seriously consider joining the Dark Side of PPC advertising, or at least dip your toe in the water.
I'm just sayin....
Link To Original PDF Excerpt > http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2007/09/hotchkiss-eye-tracking-2005.pdf
Note! Some of this information may be out of date. I'm resurrecting some previous articles that I feel still have value.
