Spammers are wrong when they offer you to enlarge your tool to make it perform better. At least when it comes to your main online marketing tool (i.e. your website). Keeping it small and narrow is a more effective strategy.

Says who? Says Google. Not long ago they rolled out a new tool that shows you how your website appears in different browsers depending on their size. The tool is called Browser Size and can be found in Google labs at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

It's very simple, yet it gives you a new insight into how well you use the real estate on your webpage. Since we work (and often live) online we sure have high-resolution displays that can fit in almost anything. We know that our site's navigation is the handiest in the world and we can get to any page in next to no time. But in most cases our experience of our sites and the web at large is different from that of our prospects.

The key to successful online marketing lies in the ability to put yourself in your client's shoes and have a look at your site from the other side. And that's what Browser Size enables you to do. And when you do that, it turns out people don't surf the web the way you do. They don't see your site the way you do. And what about that cool widget you've put for your visitors to click on? Well, they don't see it at all.

A look at your site through your client's eyes

Using Browser Size is easy. You enter your web page URL and it shows you what parts of your website fit into people's browsers. Here's an example of how Site Reference appears in different browsers.



As you can see from the screenshot the majority of people (90%) see most of the navigation links, the featured post and the video. These are the prime spots on the Site-Reference online real estate. Pretty strong reason to write a good guest post and get all the attention, huh?

The advertise link and more related videos appear above the fold only for 50% of the users, the rest have to scroll to see them. Of course interested advertisers should be motivated enough to search for the advertise section. I'm pretty sure site-reference doesn't have a lack of sponsors. Still if your site depends on advertising it may be a good idea to place the link to your media kit above the fold. So check your site to make sure all the critical elements are in the top-spot.

Does your website rank above the fold?

Browser size sure helps you analyze your own website, but that’s not the only application for this tool. As an SEO I thought it would be a cool idea to apply Browser Size to Google's SERPs and see what rankings appear above the fold. The tool's data is based on browser sizes of people using Google, so the results should be very close to reality.


It turned out that if you rank in top 4 your site shows up above the fold for 90-99% of searchers. If you're in the fifth position 20% of people will have to scroll down to see your website. Still think that ranking #5 is good enough? The 6th spot is only seen by 40% of searchers and 60% have to scroll, and so on. The picture is largely affected by AdWords ads when they appear in top position. Want to learn how many people don't see the 4th position when there 2 Google ads above the organic results? Check out the full experiment

When it comes to rankings we usually tend to think in numbers: 1st rank, 5th rank; or in blocks: top 10, top 5, top 3, etc. But you can also think about rankings in terms of above and below the fold. And when you apply that perspective to rankings, search volumes, competition research, etc. it turns out there's much more to the game.

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