Why is it important to be on the Google first page?

Imagine the following scenario :

You simply want to find the best but free-e-card website available on the Internet. You will simply go to Google and type the phrase “best free e-card” and press enter. Google will give you about 92,000,000 results (as of the time this article is written) ordered by

the relevance. The first page usually contains about 10 results that are considered the most relevant to the phrase searched for.

What will you do  now?  Will you be starting from somewhere in the middle of the result?

Or will you click on the first result given on the first page? Obviously, it will be the first or the second result in the first page.

This is how a normal user behaves. If he/she searches for something inGoogle, he/she will be most likely to settle with information available on the first page.

Have you ever heard of ‘heat maps’? Heat maps are generated to identify the areas of a web page that users mostly look at. Sophisticated cameras are used in order to generate this map, to track the eye movement of users. Following is a heat map generated for Google search result page.

The red areas indicates what the users most frequently look when a Google result page is loaded. The orange and yellow areas are looked at less intensively while green and blue get even lesser attention. The red horizontal line in the middle of the page denotes the page fold. The section below the page fold is what users do not see at one glance therefore, users will need to scroll down in order to read what appear below this line.

If you carefully inspect the image, you will see that :

1. Only the firs two results are seen by almost all users.
2. only about 60% of the users have looked at the third and forth results.
3. Users rarely navigate to the lower part of the results page located below the page fold.

If you want to make your business visible to millions internet users everyday, than your website should be listed within the first five results of the Google search page.

There are many ways to reach that prestigious position. One of them is by using SEO. May you want to tell me one or more, please drop me in the comment box below.

Thanks.