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How much better is a number one organic listing than a number two result? That is often a question webmasters, publishers, site owners ask themselves and others. A WebmasterWorld thread asked that exact question.
Tedster, a WebmasterWorld administrator, answered it with AOL's leaked data from 2006. Tedster shared the click-through rate by position:
- #1 - 47% click-through
- #2 - 13% click-through
- #3 - 9%click-through
- #4 - 7% click-through
The SEO Black Hat blog went through this in more detail. And so did the SEO Scientist. So take a look there as well.
I should add that Universal Search and the way the search engines are showing more than just organic results on a page may significantly impact these numbers.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Michael Martinez
12/18/2009 03:37 pm
People need to take that data with a heavy bag of salt. It is very old (more than 3-1/2 years). It represents a statistically insignificant subset of the Internet population (which numbered in the hundreds of millions at the time). And it represents only a fraction of just one search engine's audience. And it only captures 3 months' activity, thus failing to include full seasonal and cyclical trends. A lot of really bad analysis has been published on the basis of this data.
No Name
12/18/2009 06:29 pm
I don't care how bad the analysis is. No one is claiming it's exact numbers. It's simply meant to show the extreme difference between positions.
Scott Mc
12/22/2009 01:06 am
Why is this breaking SEO news? The data is nearly 4 years old and I don't seen anything new that's been added to the discussion. Just because it's the holidays, folks, doesn't mean you should recycle old news.
Barry Schwartz
12/22/2009 01:26 am
Scott, please read what I wrote above before being nasty. "answered it with AOL's leaked data from 2006" plus I linked to a post that is years old. I never said this was "breaking SEO news."
Greg Power
12/22/2009 09:15 am
For a couple of my 'trophy' keywords/phrases, I have position 1 on Google with one-line sitelinks and Webmaster Tools reports a 26% CTR. Make of that what you will.
Ferrari Limo
04/02/2011 04:47 am
People tend to click the first listings in the search result, because they think that this will be the more appropriate and best result.