This is pretty amazing stuff!  In the past 3 years, web searchers (where much of your prospect bases starts their vacation home rental searching) have moved from reading through the entire page of Google Search Results to only skimming the top of the page and then refining their search if they do not see what they are looking for, rather than reading the whole page. 

See this information from Think Eyetracking about where people are looking their search results – 2005 vs. 2008.

Description from Think Eyetracking:  As seen in the heatmap above, fixations are studded around the top 5 results and the majority of clicks are upon the top 3 results (discounting the sponsored link). The sponsored link was actually not well attended to due to the fact that searchers are now familiar with advertiser placement within Google. The 2008 heatmap supports the recent trend observed by Cornell University (Their study found that the top 3 Google results get 79% of all clicks) and by AOL (Findings were that 63% of clicks were concentrated upon the top three search results).

Furthermore when asked afterwards what they would normally do when they couldn’t find their desired search result on the first page of Google, 87% respondents replied that they would modify the search terms or refine the search by category. 97% of people tested answered that Google was the search engine they most commonly used and out of those people, 87% stated they wouldn’t bother using anything else.

What do you make of this trend?  I feel that the concepts of optimizing for a variety of search terms and especially keyPHRASES is more important than ever.   Shoppers have learned that they can get better results by getting more specific in their search requests.

Ralf
LiveRez