Any SEO wants to attract visitors to their own or their clients' websites. Even when you manage that, though, how can you be sure that your message is getting across? Eye tracking is one way to find out whether your message is being seen. Researchers have been using this scientific tool to uncover some interesting results, with real implications for business owners and SEOs.
In the relatively early days of the World Wide Web, when advertisers and business owners were just starting to get a handle on how to sell to all those users, you heard the word “eyeballs” used frequently. Those who built and advertised on websites spent a lot of time and effort attracting as many eyeballs to their sites as possible. They also worked hard to find ways to keep those eyeballs looking – this is when websites started being referred to as “sticky.” Never mind the images conjured up by using “sticky” and “eyeballs” in the same context; the point was to get people to see your message, and hopefully motivate them to do what you wanted them to do.
Today, the eyes still have it, but Web professionals think about them in much more sophisticated ways. You may have heard of this; it’s called eye tracking. Among other things, scientists have used the principles of eye tracking to develop interfaces that are controlled entirely by where a user moves his or her eyes. In this case, however, eye tracking is used simply to study where a user moves his or her eyes when reading something, such as a magazine or a Web page. While researchers have been studying the way people read websites almost since the very earliest days of the Web itself, some of the results, even today, have proved to be surprising.
Eye tracking is not obscure; a search on the term in Google brings back close to four million hits. Many companies offer eye tracking services. For a relatively nominal fee, the firm will do an eye tracking study of a client’s website, interpret the results, and make recommendations for a redesign, if necessary. Since an eye tracking study will tell you exactly where visitors are looking when they go to your website, it is one way to tell whether the items you want them to see – and presumably act on – are actually being seen. Equally important, it will tell you whether your Web page has any “dead zones” that are being ignored entirely. As one waggish observer of eye tracking commented, “If your content falls on a Web page and nobody sees it, does it really exist?” Greg Edwards, who blogs for the eye tracking company Eyetools, answers that question with one that is more to the point: “If your content falls on a Web page and nobody sees it, does it make a click?”
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