Here’s a reason to pay more attention to your search engine rankings – the top three spots on Google get 58% of clicks.  

Optify (via Searchengine watch) carried out a study, which showed that websites at the top of Google get an average of 36.4% of clicks, those in second place 12.5% and those in third 9.5%.

That chimes in with an earlier Chitika study, showing that the no 1 spot on Google gets 34.35% of traffic.   Optify also says that being any further back than page two has no real business value for you at all.

Not surprisingly, as I work for a social media agency, I am a big believer in SEO + social working together.    For example, Comscore has shown that 50% of ‘social media exposed’ surfers search for product terms every day compared to 33% of non-exposed surfers.    In other words, SEO can help improve your rankings but social media can prompt them to try and find out more in the first place.

Then of course, the search engine giants themselves are constantly looking for ways to embrace so-called ‘social search.’

The San Francisco Chronicle has a good summary of how search engines are tapping into social.  As (MIcrosoft) Bing’s Paul Yiu says in the piece, “search up until recently has been a lonely experience.    We want to introduce people as an important part of search.”

Related articles

• Top Google Result Gets 36.4% of Clicks [Study] (searchenginewatch.com)
• Bing Tests New Homepage Layout #SEWatch (seome.me)
• Google Map Maker: User Generated Tagging of Live Google Maps #SEWatch (seome.me)
• Foursquare Wants To Pair With Google, Yahoo, Bing And Other Search Players @SEWatch (seome.me)

Search engines make you smarter, so say researchers from Penn State University (via Science Daily).    Well…kind of.   But they don’t make you stupid as Nicholas Carr claimed in his seminal Atlantic Magazine article last year.

Researchers looked at search habits of 72 participants engaging in 426 tasks.   Rather than search being used to find out new stuff, search engines were “primarily used for fact checking users’ own internal knowledge.”   According to the academics, that means that search is actually part of our own internal learning process.

Hence the fears about students for example getting lazy and just using Google rather than their brains to find out answers might be incorrect.  Instead, Google, Bing et al support “higher level information needs”, i.e to increase the chances that we get the right answer and to put detail on things we already know.

That makes sense if you look at how search habits are evolving, in particular lengthening.   Last week Hitwise’s Asia-Pacific analyst Alan Long put out a post on lengthening search terms.   Something that Hitwise says is an international trend – one and two word searches have gone down over the past three years and 3+ word searches have gone up.

People already have a fair idea of what they are after when they go to search, hence more specific searches.  As a result, search is as much to validate and build on existing knowledge as to find new one.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft’s Bing okayed to power Yahoo!7 Search (mumbrella.com.au)
• Did Bing’s Growth Spurt Come to a Halt in September? (readwriteweb.com)
• Twitter Doesn’t Pass Along Google-juice (siliconangle.net)

Econsultancy has details of a study that shows that half (48%) of tweeple have searched about a brand after being introduced to it on Twitter, compared to 32% across all social networks.

Econsultancy says, “If true, that’s a big deal.”   Yes it is – just like the earlier research showing that 20% of tweets are about brands it provides tangible proof that social media and Twitter engagement pays off.

The research was conducted by Performics Marketing and ROI research.  According to the results, 44% of people had recommended a product on Twitter and 39% discussed it.   Facebook ranked even higher for product recommendations, with 46% recommending brands on there.

An earlier study by Comscore similarly showed that people exposed to brand chatter on social media were significantly more likely both to search for that brand and click on search ads.

Image – Wisleywoven

Related articles by Zemanta

• Consumers Sharing Brand Opinions on Social Networks (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Twitter Lists will organize the social graph (socialmediatoday.com)
• Social media going corporate (sfgate.com)