A new study in the field of search behaviour has unearthed a few interesting facts about clicking habits of online users, and about what gets clicked how many times. It’s an interesting bit of information for anyone caring, and should offer the people who know what to do a bit of insight into the minds of their visitors.

The main result of the test is that people tend to click on specialized searches when searching for general terms (like they search for golf balls and you give them golf balls images or videos in the results) than when searching for specialized terms.

The first new concept here is blended search results. These are results which, besides normal search results, contain specialized items such as images, youtube videos and so on. Also, these include searches for news items, or shopping items (the top bar from the Google search results).

The results from this step of the study reveal:

• 36% of searchers click news results within blended search results, while only 17% click a news result after conducting a news-specific search.
• 31% of search engine users click image results within blended search results, while 26% click an image result after conducting an image-specific search.
• 17% of search engine users click video results within blended search results, while only 10% click a video result after conducting a video-specific search.
• Images are the most clicked result type after a specialized search.
• News items are the most clicked result type within blended search results.

The second part of the study refers to search behaviour on the first page of results. It seems it is becoming more and more important. It used to be said that first page results are each tenfold separated (first is ten times as effective as second, second ten times as third etc), but it seems this has expanded to 100-fold.

The actual results:

• 68% of search engine users click results on the first page of search results, compared to 62% in 2006, and 60% in 2004.
• Only 8% of search engine users review more than the first three pages prior to clicking on a result.
• 49% of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they are looking for, change and/or re-launch their search after reviewing just the first page of search results, up from 40% in 2006, and 42% in 2004.
• 37% of online users associate appearance at the top of search results with a company’s leadership within its industry or category, up slightly from 35% in 2006 and 33% in 2002.

So as you can see top page results means you get associated with an authority in the field. For example, I’m considered to be an authority on Google crawling due to some recent articles (for some specific searches). Although this is not far from the truth, the rather short life of the blog (mid-February) makes it rather unexpected.

What we can see from this study which clearly shows page one results as essential is that if you’re not on the first page, you must optimize your website. Also, make sure you hire someone who can write copy, because no matter how good you are at writing copy you may not be specialized to write seo’d titles. This is highly important because no matter how high you are in the results, it’s likely people will click a title that resembles what they thought of when searching, even if it’s lower on the bottom. I’ve even had page five clicks because I write quality titles. Use scarcity, mystery and include a call to action if you can.

For those wanting the study you can get it as a results pdf. We have to thank these guys, this is really important stuff…

In another study, rather unrelated, we find out that out of all web searches 80% are for research, whereas only 10% are transactional (actual purchases), which means you really need to rethink AdWords spending. Are you sure your keywords convert properly? Are they too general or too specific? I’ve talked to a potential client today who had 4 keywords, all very general, and they did not want to give them up because they had a lot of visits, even though they felt leads were rather uncorrelated to the ads. I can’t wait to see conversion ratios and bounce rates because I really feel (in a backed up by research way) that general terms convert like crap… Let’s hope I’ll get a chance to fix their conversion rate, it’s a shame to spend a lot of money on keywords which don’t bring you the amount of business you need at a price you want. I mean it’s a good idea to spend the same amount on many keywords with high conversion rates, proper landing pages and awesome ad copy rather than go general and get less than perfect hits on general terms. I mean, only based on that study and you’re wasting 80% of your money…

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