According to a recent article published by eMarketer, an eye tracking study shows search behavior by internet users tend to follow organic search results more often than paid search engine advertising. What does this mean? Well, it confirms that internet users are getting more savvy in terms of ignoring paid results to find what they are searching for. Strong and effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are becoming more important than ever for small businesses trying to get noticed in the increasingly competitive fight to be found on the internet. This is also good news for any small business that may not have the budget to compete with pay-per-click advertising and would rather spend their marketing dollars on an experienced internet marketing company providing SEO consulting services.

The study illustrates that organic results appearing on Google and Bing “were viewed 100% of the time, and participants spent an average of 14.7 and 10.7 seconds looking at organic search results on Google and Bing, respectively.  However, only 28% of participants looked at right-side ads on Google” The eyes don’t lie!

While this might help job security comfort for small business web design and internet marketing companies (like ours), there continues to be an education gap in terms of what local businesses perceive that they truly need and can’t live without. Some companies still have the sense that if you build an attractive website, the flood gates will open and all their worries will wash away with a cool looking website. Don’t get me wrong, our company specializes in building top notch web site designs built with strong SEO framework. But if we just designed websites for our clients and walked away, more often than not, their phones won’t start ringing. A good website design will often times be the deciding factor IF customers find the site in the first place.

The research and data that we find from web analytics (for all of our clients) points to SEO and website design as the leading internet marketing solutions and quickest return on investment.