The Golden Triangle (and the Red Headed Irish SEO Lady) in the Room

Thinking back on it now, I'm sorry to say that I did not get the name or a picture of one the most colorful personalities attending the Search Engine Strategies conference. Picture this -- a red headed Irish woman stands up with microphone before a large auidence of 300 session attendees and asks with a firry thick Irish brogue, (paraphrasing) 'I just came from another session where we learned about the new research studies (by Jupiter, Enquiro / DidIt, and Marketing Sherpa). These studies indicate advertisers are spending 80% of their SEM budgets on paid search while 80% of searches end in an organic listing click. Why is that?' Her heartfelt sentiment is that marketers are spending a disproportionate amount of their budget on paid listings when the majority of clicks and conversions are coming from the organic SERPs.

I think most search engine marketing people (especially Organic Search Engine Optimizers) have been saying and wondering when mainstream marketing types are going to wake up, smell the elephants, and begin to figure out how their business is going to stop taking the path of least resistance and start investing more time and resources into organic search engine positions (SERPs).

Just to make sure we're all on the same page. Here's my handy dandy chart that highlights the difference between a Sponsored Listing (advertisement - bidding for the click) and a Organic Listing (editorial - search engines include the listing for free based on relevance to the search) and the Features section(related news and items).

Sure, paid listings are easy, quantifiable, and they do deliver great results, but aren’t marketers supposed to be looking beyond the next quarter’s results. I can tell you that the marketers that are investing into both paid search and organic are doing a much greater service for their company's long term market positioning -- not to mention getting more bang for their marketing dollar.

Now to support these points, I’ve provided a couple visuals from the acclaimed reports and then links to some excellent analysis articles.

Where Do Searchers Look?

The first visual is from the newest research into search engine results page position and sponsored vs. organic. It comes from an eye tracking study conducted by search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it. The study Eyetools amazing technology that measures eye-movement as people look at web pages. One of the key findings was that 100% of the participants in the study looked at a key area they call the Golden Triangle, which includes the top of page sponsored results, the features section and the top three organic results.

If you’re looking for some excellent analysis of this study, take a look at this article on Stephan Spencer's Scatterings New eye tracking study: where Google searchers look and click and this one on Search Day written by Chris Sherman, called A New F-Word for Google Search Results.

Where Do Searchers Click?

The second visual is the product of similar study by Marketing Sherpa / Enquiro that looked at what listings searchers click on. The study asked a focus group of B-to-B buyers to perform a search for specific terms and their click actions were tracked.
Here are the stats from the study.

• 62% Section C – Above the fold Organic
• 14.2% Section A – Top Sponsored
• 3.7% Section D – Side Sponsored
• 20.1% Section B – Alt & Feature Listing

What this suggests to me is that if you want to spend all of your SEM budget on paid search - great, but you're only capturing the tip of the iceberg. How many of those organic clicks are going to your competitors?