Click Through Rate by Search Engine Result Positions
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.
Like The Story? Vote For It On Yahoo Buzz! Or On Sphinn!
rustybrick in Search Engine Optimization at December 18, 2009 8:23 AM
Comments (5)
Sphinn 
• Tweet This! 
• Digg 
• Delicious 
• StumbleUpon 
• Google Co-op 
Comments
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.
Posted by Michael Martinez at December 18, 2009 10:37