Click Through Rates On Top Google Rankings

I’m sick of seeing SEO companies offering “guaranteed to get your listed on the first page”. Seriously, if you’re an SEO and in the business of improving Google rankings, aiming for anything less than top 5 you’re ripping your clients off. Sure the average business owner wouldn’t know that the drop off rate from 1st to 10th is close to 1400%, but professional SEO companies should be informing their clients of these facts.

CTR Based on Top Google Rankings

A study was done back in 2006 on click through rates (CTR) for top Google rankings which. The breakdown of the proportion of clicks that each ranking position got has been displayed below:

Ranking 1st: 42.13%
Ranking 2nd: 11.90%
Ranking 3rd: 8.50%
Ranking 4th: 6.06%
Ranking 5th: 4.92%
Ranking 6th: 4.05%
Ranking 7th: 3.41%
Ranking 8th: 3.01%
Ranking 9th: 2.85%
Ranking 10th: 2.99%

Second Page: 10.18%

So You Pursue Top Google Rankings; Not Top 10

Given the above evidence why would anyone aim to rank anything but first? Getting on the first page just simply isn’t enough to compete long term and this doesn’t even factor for the reality that most people are substantially more inclined to purchases from their first point of contact than additional points of contact.

So Why Such A Substantial CTR Drop Off?

At the end of the day realistically the bulk of the CTR drop off comes back to a couple of factors:

• Refine rather than scrolling - most people are more inclined to refine their search further by adding an extra keyword when the top search results don’t seem to match what they were looking for rather than scrolling through the results and additional pages.
• People are satisfiers not optimisers - most people are looking for something that satisfies their problem or query, they’re not looking for perfect information. So if the top result provides adequate information to solve their problem they are not going to continue on through the rankings visiting other sites.
• Assumption of best results are first - unfortunately the majority of searchers have come to assume that Google automatically provides them the best result for their query making lower ranked results erroneous.
• Keywords in title – top results are more likely to have the keywords search for in the title tag which Google then bolds which significantly increases CTR as a result of attracting the eye.

Now whilst as a general rule of thumb the higher you’re Google rankings the better the CTR, however this phenomenon may vary between topics search for and purpose of the search. For example if someone was searching to purchase or book something online (particularly bigger ticket items) it’s unlike that they’d limit their research to just the first result. As in with searches that precede action being taken which is of high value then a greater amount of research will be conducted. Nonetheless ranking higher is still always better.

Increasing Competition in Search Engine Result Pages Coming From Google

Over the past couple of years Google has evolved into more than a search engine. They have moved into web analytics, emails, video, maps, advertising, images, rss and even publishing themselves. With their diversification has come the leveraging of their core asset – their own search engine result pages (SERPs) to support their own secondary assets. We have seen the introduction of images, maps, local business listings, youtube videos and aggressive advertising into their own SERPs which have increased the competition for searchers clicks.

This trend isn’t likely to reverse and highlights just how important it is to diversify you internet marketing strategy into more realms than just SEO.