From the Marketing Sherpa report excerpt: a heatmap…revealing how actual consumers’ eyes view listings. As you may be aware, the red blob is where most searchers looked directly; as colors change, the level of attention goes down. The “X” indicates where searchers clicked, and the red horizontal bar shows how far down folks scrolled to view listings.

User behavior upon viewing a search results page has always fascinated me although I have never attempted to actually test this behavior or track the physiology behind it. The folks at Marketing Sherpa annually do that and the results are both instructive and beautiful.

Among their key findings: … is the attention to which search users pay what we call the “bullet points” within top listings… these eyetracking results indicate you can’t afford to wait for a time when Google stops changing the One Box (if indeed they ever stop changing.)… In addition, as our past eyetracking tests (also included in the appendix of this Guide) have
revealed:
– There’s a “red triangle” of attention in the upper-left corner, beyond which eyes don’t
stray.

There have been some discussions here and elsewhere about what the value of the onebox local listing was to a business. This research points toward the critical nature of the upper area of the screen and particularly of the onebox in all of its forms.

It appears that the users have a strong propensity to focus and click on the local listing onebox links and only the top two organic listings. It may be hot at the top but it gets cold pretty quickly as you move down the page. Thus, you really need to strive for both a top 3 Local Onebox listing AND a top 3 organic listing on your “location + service” phrase.