As SEO professionals our goal continues to be to get your business found as often and quickly as possible when a prospective customer sits down and does a search. A part of that goal is to try to get your business listed as close as possible to the top of the search engine results pages.
Now Bing, which is putting a lot of muscle behind growing and supporting their search engine, has some interesting findings that support what most of us already knew. More than 50% of searches click on the top listing result of a Bing search and more than 75% click that top result if it is a listing with deep links. You know, those results that have both a main and sub-listings with it like this:
In fact, according to the study, only 4-6% click the third result down the page and the percentage continues to diminish for each successive results.
Bing was so sure of these findings that it has limited the number of initial returns a searcher will get for his or her query. Only if the user back-clicks after the clicking a link on the initial results page does the user get presented with a greater number of potential answers. In fact, the results a searcher gets could be as few as four on the first go round.
By Don MacMellville