Chapter 24: Eye-Tracking Google SERPs—5 Tales of Pizza

Editor's Note: For years, SEOs vied for the top three spots of search results, as they have traditionally enjoyed the highest click-through rates. With the advent of Universal search, plain text listings now compete with a variety of attention-grabbing visuals, including review ratings, expanded site links, product images, videos, and maps (to name a few). Predicting the highest-converting spots on a SERP has become much harder. Eye-tracking equipment, however, can be used to figure out where a person's attention is drawn when looking at a SERP. In this post, Moz's Chief Marketing Scientist, “Dr. Pete,” shares the custom eye-tracking data he obtained firsthand in his study of five different Google SERPs for pizza queries. Originally published on The Moz Blog on Oct. 5, 2011, this post is more relevant today than ever.

A while back, we got an offer we couldn't refuse. The good folks at Mirametrix (http://mirametrix.com), an eye-tracking hardware and software company, asked if we were interested in custom eye-tracking data (which traditionally costs a small fortune) for any Google searches. Um, does Matt Cutts like cats?

Since I once worked down the hall from an eye-tracking lab, I was the obvious choice to lead this shopping spree at the nerd candy store. So, we picked five different Google search engine results pages (SERPs), representing the diversity Google has created in the past couple of years, ...

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