You hear a lot about the importance of optimizing your website so you can drive more traffic from Google and the other search engines – but how important is it to be on the first page versus the other pages? Does it make all that much of a difference if you are on page one or page 3?
Well according to a recent study, the answer is Yes!
iProspect put out a white paper based on their research of search engine user behavior. They measured the impact that it can have on your business depending on where you rank for a certain keyword.
Their results show that 62% of the clicks for any particular keyword are to websites on the first page of the index results. 28% of the clicks to go websites on pages 2 and 3 while only 10% of the clicks go to websites on pages 4 or higher. According to the study:
“Key among the findings relating to the current search engine user community is that 62% of search engine users click on a search result within the first page of results, and a full 90% of search engine users click on a result within the first three pages of search results. Fewer search engine users are willing to click on results past the third page now (10%).”
There is still some work to be done as it would interesting to know, for example, what the difference is between ranking in the first or tenth position. Both are on the first page of the results but likely get far difference click through rates.
The study, however, does start to shed some light on the importance of search engine optimization. If you are not ranking on the first page for your desired keyword then you are likely not getting any significant results from your SEO efforts.
Either look to change the keyword you are trying to rank for or boost your efforts by getting more internal and external links so you have a chance of coming up on the first page.
Evan Carmichael
This is interesting but I think pretty intuitive if you think about how you do searching yourself. How many times when you search on Google (or any other search engine for that matter) do you bother with anything listed after, say, the first or maybe second page. I’m a little unusual in this case because, as a blogger, I find I sometimes like to mine for those lesser used links that come on page four or five for a given subject, but that’s a preference. The challenge is how to get better ranking when yor subject matter, in my case bootstrap business, is hooked to a word (like bootstrap) that could relate to so many other things as well.