The popularity of search engines have grown over the years to be a vital source for webmasters to receive valuable visitors to their website and in the process, most are caught in a constant battle trying to get their site listed on the first page of their desired keyword. It is no surprise considering that the search engines holds the majority of visitors and not to mention, it’s a free source of traffic. But is getting onto the first page results enough?
Not a lot of webmasters know of the statistics but that can be forgiven given that most webmasters are occupied with a thousand other things to do like use their time to increase their rankings, create content, and etc.
There will be three sets of statistics that I will be showing you today from a number of trustworthy sources that conducted studies on click distribution on the front page of search results. Although the statistics may be staggering to the eye, they all point to same conclusion. A conclusion that I will leave for you to decide from the statistics that I will be showcasing.
There are 3 data sets & studies currently in existence to help us understand traffic distribution by SERP position:
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AOL’s 2006 Data Leak – In 2006, AOL accidentally leaked over 30 million search queries from over 600,000 AOL search users. This has been discussed many times since then. See Richard Hearne and Bob Hodgson.
BrandSoftech.com Study – New software recently developed by BrandSoftech allowed them to track and create statistics based on over 63 gambling sites, which received 5,357,519 clicks from 29,327 different key phrases typed into Google. The ingenious software looked up a site’s position for a key phrase the moment it received a click from Google.
Cornell University Eye-Tracking Study – In 2004, Laura A. Granka, Thorsten Joachims and Geri Cay conducted a user-behavoir study focused around search behavoir specifically on Google. They used an eye-tracking study of a sample of undergraduate students to determine clicks and attention distribution.
As you can see from the statistics, there is a large discrepancy from all three sources for the percentage that clicks on the first result. However, what one can infer ultimately about the first place position is that the first listing gets a good portion of clicks. Although it is sort of obvious that the first place position would get most of the clicks, just by looking at the studies done on behavioral searching, it is scary to think that 2nd and 3rd place position gets anywhere around 3-4 times less clicks than the first place position even though they are like 4 centimeters away from each other.
