Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

HOW SEARCHERS EVALUATE THE PAGE THEY’VE CLICKED ON

We can judge a site visually in as little as 50 milliseconds.27 And when performing a task, we focus on that and become blind to anything else. Even if visitors to a site look directly at something, they may not see it at all if it doesn’t obviously apply to their task.

This behavior correlates well with customer behavior in a store. In Why We Buy, Paco Underhill describes how shoppers enter stores. They don’t stop at the front door and look around. They walk in and scan as they go. Much of what they see during this transition is lost on them.28

Even in physical stores, shoppers scan words quickly. “Putting a sign that requires 12 seconds to read in a place where customers spend four seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage,” says Underhill.

Product placement can help maximize sales both in stores and on your site. The salsa will sell better next to the chips than next to the mustard.

A vital part of search acquisition success is knowing what page the searcher lands on and how easily the searcher can scan the page and recognize that it answers his or her query.29

Consider the query [what do Peace Corps volunteers do]. It leads searchers to a page that clearly answers the searcher’s question. The context and purpose of the page are clear on even a quick scan (Figure 3.24).

Figure 3.24 Peace Corps Website Visitor Experience

Source: Peacecorps.gov

From Page to Conversion

Once the searcher lands ...