Achieving good search engine rankings is critical to the success of any website or business. It is easy to achieve a good ranking on your own business name (in most cases!) but achieving rankings on targeted and high traffic keywords has to become the bed rock of any Internet Marketing strategy.
Everybody knows that your search engine rankings directly affect your website traffic but what is less well known is exactly how beneficial achieving a certain ranking will be and how that will influence your sales and profits
What Is All The Fuss About?
Ranking 1st for competitive keywords is the perfect outcome of any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign. But what exactly is all the fuss about ranking in position 1? Basically, the website at rank 1 gets the majority of the search traffic for that keyword and to demonstrate that in scientific terms you can see below the breakdown of the distribution of clicks for the top 10 rankings. This image is from the research at Cornell University by Laura A. Granka:
Eye-Tracking Studies
How the human eye interprets information on a computer screen is central to the decision making process the human brain goes through dictating how it selects the links to click. This premise formed the foundation for Granka's study.
The results of eye tracking research provide Internet marketers with information on clickthrough rates, thus allowing them to make correct predictions on traffic changes as their rankings are gained or lost. For SEO experts the results provide a basis for improving the interfaces of search engines and metrics to evaluate the relevancy of the presented search results.
Granka used a sample of undergraduate students instructed to perform search in Google for 397 queries on topics covering movies, travel, music, politics, local and trivia. This study has produced the results you can see above
As you can see, rank 1 should always be your target. However, notice that rank 5 has more clicks than rank 4 and rank 8 and 10 has more clicks than rank 9.
Part of the reason for those non-linear results will be based on the standard of the listings (the page titles and page descriptions influence clicks just as much as the ranking themselves) So not only should you target rank 1 but you should also make sure to optimize your titles and descriptions to be interesting and to make people want to read more.
What Happens to The Traffic After Page 1
Now that you know the click distribution for ranks 1 to 10 lets take a look at the click distribution between pages.
To put BOTH of these set of figures into a different perspective if we assume we were looking at a keyword which gets 10,000 searches per day, a listing on page 1 at position 1 would achieve 5,600 of those clicks. Position 2 would get 1300 and position 3 would achieve 1000 visits per day.
However, the top listing on page 2 would only achieve 250 per day and that would get worse with a listing in the middle of page 2 (total rank 15) which would only deliver 25 visits per day.
If your keyword only delivers a maximum of 1,000 searches overall per day - you'd be looking at a tenth of the above stats.
The Marketing Sherpa Study
Do you ever wonder where most users click on the Google search results pages? MarketingSherpa did a study back in 2006, using a heat map. The study tracks the mouse arrow on the page and where they click.
What the heat map confirms is the natural tendency to the listings at the top of the page - and very little mouse movement inside the sponsored listing area.
Interestingly this information can be broken down into percentage of searches executed
Organic Listings:
Rank 1 - 100%
Rank 2 - 100%
Rank 3 - 100%
Rank 4 - 85%
Rank 5 - 60%
Rank 6 - 50%
Rank 7 - 50%
Rank 8 - 30%
Rank 9 - 30%
Rank 10 - 20%
Paid Listings (PPC - Sponsored Ads):
Rank 1 - 50%
Rank 2 - 40%
Rank 3 - 30%
Rank 4 - 20%
Rank 5 - 10%
Rank 6 - 10%
Rank 7 - 10%
Rank 8 - 10%
So if your Adwords ad resides in the 5th place, you get 10 times less click exposure than the one residing in the 1st place on the organic section.
