Over the last ten years of search the goal for search engine optimisers was to get their client websites into the top 10 or 1st page of the search results. Recently, people’s search habits have changed slightly, they are more impatient than ever before and are getting better at selecting their own chosen search keywords. One word searches are becoming less used, people are now using ‘two to four keywords‘ when searching on the internet as they realise the likelihood of them finding what they want will increase if they use long tail keywords.
The more refined search engine algorithms become, naturally the better the search engine results will also get. With Matt Cutts and his team of spam killers doing such a good job at destroying ‘Page Rank‘ to any site that adopts black hat SEO techniques, the search results are becoming more aligned to the searchers needs. We can see in the below image the actions internet users are using when searching on the 1st page of Google.
From position 1 to 5 the click volume decreases gradually. There is a slight showing of clicks on the right - hand column, which is Google’s Adwords (paid advertising). From positions 6 to 10 very little clicks have been detected by the heat map.
This visual heatmap explains graphically how important it is to be in the top 5 or more importantly to be #1 in Google otherwise your website is losing out in significant traffic.
