Making your search engine marketing efforts pay off.

"... 42% of users clicked the top search hit, and 8% of users clicked the second hit."

How do you get results from your search engine marketing efforts?

This item from Nielsen 's Alertbox makes a couple of interesting points. First, the top ranking in a search clearly has a payoff. This little study indicates that a large percentage of searchers will click on the top link. Interestingly, it is not "most" searchers, as the study shows that when results of the search were artificially shuffled, searchers tended to move down the list for their first click.

What this tells us, as marketers, is that you need to pay attention to the content on your pages that the search engines will display in a search results page. This requires more effort, and more attention to detail on the part of the page designer, but, as always, attention to detail does have a payoff!

We have talked in our clinic many times about how to identify what different search engines will display on their results pages. Make use of what you learn to improve your performance on the web and the bottom line in your business!