WARNING: YOU HAVE 3 SECONDS!
That’s right! Research indicates that you have between 3 to 8 seconds to get a searcher to click on your listing or to make your visitor decide to stay on your website, rather than ‘click on’ and go elsewhere.
In a recent Conference Call, we discussed how you need to ensure the key elements of your website ‘grab’ your visitor and make them decide to stay, as well as eye-tracking studies that reveal the way that searchers view Search Engine Results Pages (‘SERP’s). So here’s a bit more about how to grab your visitor and make him/her stay…
Eyeball It!
We are becoming ever more internet-savvy and impatient for results… Recent ‘heat map’ eye-tracking studies of search behaviour described by thinkeyetracking.com indicate that – in the last 3 years – we have gone from reading every line of the search results (the old ‘F Pattern’) to reading mostly just the results in the top left corner of the screen.
A study by eyetools.net similarly shows up the ‘Golden Triangle’, in the top left corner of the SERPs, dominantly viewed by searchers, with a brief glance at the top sponsored results at the top right.
And you should watch the video below, and view Google Blog page Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye, to understand just how fast the average person searches a web page to check whether it has relevant information!
And this applies to Landing and Sales pages too! As the eyetools study comments… “People don’t always realize that they can optimize their landing pages using eyetracking results to better convert their traffic into sales. If you’re paying for traffic, you can make a huge improvement in ROI by optimizing landing pages (30% boost in sales!)”.
Google Page 1
In the thinkeyetracking study, “87% respondents replied that they would modify the search terms or refine the search by category” if they couldn’t find their desired search result on the first page of Google, rather than go on to further pages.
So being in the top 5 to 10 listings on the fist page of Google results really does matter – whether for Organic or Search results!
Grab Your Visitor by the (Eye)balls!
Within 3 seconds of your visitor arriving on your website, the page needs to have convinced him/her clearly that they’ve (at last!) come to the right place!
Some of the key elements that will help convince your visitors stay on your website – and hence reduce your ‘Bounce Rate’ (people leaving from the page they arrived on) – include:
- Easy viewing of key information ‘above the fold’ in the ‘golden triangle’ – ie visible in top left corner of the first screen.
- A strong headline that includes the Keyword they used to reach your site
- A graphic that mirrors the Keyword
- Few distractions
- A clear reason to go on reading…
You can read more about background and strategies for this at the following websites
Don’t worry about the ‘Adwords’ angle etc – focus on what these tell us about how we need to grab visitors’ attention and lead them through our web pages by KEEPING THEIR INTEREST!
So the moral of the story is ‘think like your prospects’ – as they say, “walk a mile in your customer’s shoes!”
Grab your visitor by the eyeballs, take him/her by the hand and lead them briskly through your page sequence, feeding their excitement as you go, till you make them a ‘no-brainer’ offer they can’t refuse – what Mark Joyner calls the ‘Irresistible Offer’.
Happy copywriting!
John Thornely