Eye Tracking Study Reveals Surprising Results About Search Snippets
Posted on by Ryan Deiss in Search Engine Optimization
A study was conducted by 2 students at a Barcelona university to track the eye movement of people doing search queries in Google and Yahoo.
The study was done on 58 people between the age of 18 of 55 who regularly use search engines. 80% of the participants were between the age of 20 and 30.
The study broke down the amount of time spent looking at Titles, Snippets, URLs, and Images.
As seen above, the majority of searchers spent most of their time looking at the snippet that gets listed along with a search result. This implies that searchers are spending most of their time reading the snippet of the web page to determine the relevancy of the content to their search query.
Another section of the study shows that searchers view the organic results far more than the sponsored results. Not only are they viewing more organic results, they’re spending more time viewing them.
The simple and obvious thing to take from this study is that searchers spend most of their time looking the snippets for organic search results.
The facts would suggest that we 1- want clear and concise snippets which are most often pulled from our meta descriptions and 2- that we’ll get more ‘eye time’ with organic search results rather than paid search results, another reason to be working harder on SEO.
Do you see the shift moving towards the importance of organic results? Comment below!
*Take the time to click the Facebook Like button and Tweet Button to share this with your friends 
Tweet
Free Training Event
Reg B.
07. Jul, 2011
Ryan that is interesting stuff… I am still amazed how they can get that type of dated like that. Must be a lot of man hours go into it.
Thanks Ryan
Reg B.
Simon Hillier
27. Aug, 2010
Very interesting stats. Thanks for sharing them.
One thought re the length of time spent reading the snippets vs titles and urls – snippets/can be up to 160 characters long, whereas titles and urls are much shorter. So it kind of makes sense they take longer to absorb.
Saying that, meta descriptions should be feeling pretty chuffed with themselves – especially after the belittling they’ve experienced in the past few years
kai
26. Aug, 2010
Amazing clear data
Thank you very much for sharing!
Malcolm Clearwater
26. Aug, 2010
@kai, yeah, pretty concise data. Although, even with studies like this, should we write off PPC? How do we balance between organic seo and ppc?