First impressions last longest in SEO, study finds Ranking on page one of relevant search engine results provides 95 percent of natural search traffic for company websites, according to a study released this week by iCrossing. The report says that, “while visibility on page two or three may seem ‘visible’ to many, the likelihood that these results will drive traffic to your website is minimal.”
Search engine optimization (SEO) professionals have long been familiar with such information, and, for all the attention paid to the “long tail” of SEO techniques, a great deal of attention is still paid to page rankings.
Rob Garner, iCrossing’s strategy director, writes at Media Post that “when looking at all three [major search] engines, what is immediately interesting is that SERP click rates were within a razor-thin margin from engine to engine.”
Garner’s analysis of the results is that “most of your natural non-branded generic traffic will come from page one, so optimization priority should continue to focus on gaining page-one visibility.” Search engine optimization (SEO) efforts across all of the major search engines can easily make such a ranking more likely.
